 Good afternoon and welcome everyone to today's Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture. My name is Arvind Raman. I'm the Executive Associate Dean in the College of Engineering. Starting in 2018 the Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series invites some of the world's most accomplished and well recognized faculty and professionals to come to Purdue to engage with students and faculty in meaningful conversations about the grand challenges in the discipline. And while they come here they participate in two different events. One was a panel that all of you heard but also in a specific lecture that targets a particular topic as well. And to introduce our speaker today in more detail I'd like to call upon Professor Barrett Caldwell, the Acting Head of the School of Industrial Engineering. Thank you Arvind and thank you for staying after the refreshments. This is wonderful. It gives me tremendous pleasure to introduce Ronald Latanison or Latinician. Also true. As it turns out we have multiple areas of almost overlap but somehow we haven't met until just now. So prior to joining Exponent where actually a couple of my former students went to work Dr. Latanison was the Director of the H.H. Jule Corrosion Laboratory in the Department of Material Science and Engineering or Course 3 at MIT and held joint faculty appointments in the Department of Material Science and Engineering and in the Department of Nuclear Engineering. He led the School of Engineering Material Processing Center at MIT as its Director from 1985 to 1991 and he is now an Emeritus Professor at MIT. In April of 2015 he was appointed Adjunct Professor in the Key Laboratory of Nuclear Materials and Safety Assessment of the Institute of Metal Research in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In addition he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He's also a fellow of ASM International and of NACE International. From 1983 to 88 Dr. Latanison was the first holder of the Shell Distinguished Chair in Material Science. He was a founder of All Tran Materials Engineering Corporation established in 1992 and he has served in several capacities as at exponent as principal and director of the Mechanics and Materials practice exponents largest practice as Corporate Vice President and currently as its first senior fellow. I could spend a lot more time talking about his technical skill set and his experience editing the the bridge the publication of the National Academy of Engineering Quarterway. I do want to remark though this is probably the third area that we didn't quite overlap. He has served as a science advisor to the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology in Washington DC. He has also served as a member of the advisory committee to the Massachusetts Office of Science and Technology and executive branch office to created to strengthen the common wealth science and technology infrastructure with emphasis directed toward future economic growth. Dr. Latanison has served as a member the National Materials Advisory Board the National Research Council and now serves as a member of the NRC standing committee on chemical demilitarization. He was appointed by President George Bush and George W. Bush in June of 2002 to membership on the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. He was reappointed for a second four-year term by President Barack Obama and I even wore my my Boston tee cufflinks for you today. So without further ado I would like to introduce Dr. Ron Latanison speaking on the politics and engineering of nuclear waste management. Well I first of all let me say I enjoyed that panel discussion enormously and I was telling AJ I thought you guys must do this all the time because they came off so beautifully so my my thanks to you Mr. moderator and to the panelists that I thought that was just beautifully done so thank you very very much. Today I do want to talk to you about a topic that I consider to be extremely important on many different levels and I want to preface what I'm going to talk to you about by saying that that a great university and Purdue is a great university you educate engineers and technologists who can change the world and your students can do it I've met with some of them today they can do it but I'm gonna challenge them I'm gonna challenge the students in the following sense I'm gonna I'm gonna speak about nuclear waste but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk about radiation physics I'm not gonna talk about materials other than as much as I need to the technology is not a mystery to you guys what should be and I think it unfortunately is a mystery is the politics behind all this so I'm gonna I'm gonna make a challenge I'm not gonna tell you what it is until I get to the end therefore you have to stay and listen to this but I'm gonna challenge the students today to follow a suggestion I you might be interested in a little bit of an idea of how I got involved in studying nuclear waste it happens that I was I was sitting in my office sometime early in 2200 in two and the phone rang and my administrator came to my office and said there's someone on the phone who says it's from the White House I said well I don't usually get calls from the White House maybe I should answer this so I went to the phone and I started this fellow introduced himself and he said his name was Alberto Gonzalez and you know I knew that the president's counsel at that time was Alberto Gonzalez I said so you you sir are White House counsel he said yes I am and I'm here to tell you that you've been nominated to serve as a member of the US nuclear waste technical review board and as part of the process of deading I need to speak to you for a few minutes and I said well I'm honored so thank you let's what can I talk with you about and you know we had a very very cordial conversation for about a half an hour and about maybe 20 minutes through this conversation he said I have two fine we talked a lot about technology and handling waste and nuclear power and so on and he finally got to the point where he said I have two final questions the first one has to do it he said what is your party affiliation and I said well I'm a Democrat registered Democrat Winchester Massachusetts and that was his long pause I said well there was my appointment to the nuclear waste board Mr. Bush is a Republican but he came back online he said you know nuclear waste is not a partisan issue that doesn't matter that's fine yeah we will welcome you to the board and he said have you ever written or said anything in public that would embarrass the president and I said and this is true I said no I have much too much too much respect for that office to say anything demeaning about whoever's sitting there I may have differences but I would never say anything that would embarrass the president and that's still my position and I've been it's been challenging at times but that is still my position so I got involved because I think I think nuclear electric generation has a place in our energy mix I really do today it produces I think something less than about 20% about the energy man in the United States but I am concerned about the future and that so this is in the context of looking forward I am concerned because you know the first nuclear power plants have been operating now for almost 60 years they're being re-licensed their design life was 40 years they've been re-licensed for another 20 there there's no conversation about re-licensing for another 40 years so that plants will operate for up to 100 years that that's not unreasonable there is often a difference between design life and operational life and nuclear power plants could operate for 100 years I'm convinced it but every year a 1000 megawatt nuclear power plant produces something like 20 27 tons of nuclear waste in terms of high-level waste in terms of spent nuclear fuel that's a lot of waste and yet 60 years into their operation we still do not have a national approach to handling nuclear waste I think that's your responsible I have said in public in many occasions and much to the dismay of some my nuclear friends that I don't think we should build any more efficient nuclear power plants of any kind until we decide as a nation how we're gonna handle the waste now why haven't we why haven't we gotten to the point where we can manage nuclear waste frankly it's very straightforward we have neither the political will or the public will to do it and until we do it the countries at risk you know if there's a if there's an accident in handling nuclear waste the the risk may be low but the consequences are enormous I don't think we can continue generating nuclear waste and and continue doing I'll show you how we handle it in a few moments but I don't think we can continue generating it without having some not only policy but implemented plan for managing it and I that's so so I'm really I'm really quite concerned that we we know how to deal with it technically we just don't know how to deal with it politically or socially frankly now my point in emphasizing politics however is broader than nuclear waste I think engineers have been sort of absent from the conversation about policy issues for far too long we just don't get involved you know it's not in our wheelhouse we're very comfortable in the laboratory very comfortable talking to our colleagues who are experts we're not so comfortable talking to policymakers and yet we must because if we don't their minds will never change there will always be politics in the way and the country's interest will never be served and nuclear electric generation it has many attributes that are that are really important it's green doesn't produce any co2 it's reliable nuclear power plants operate almost continuously with the exception of the time when they're refueled they just continue humming away and it's really generally safe I mean there have been accidents but it you see in Fukushima and Three Mile Island and Chernobyl those are the kind of low risk or high risk low risk low risk high consequence events and but they make the point that we've got to deal with the kinds of issues that occur when when nuclear power plants either fail or we don't handle the waste so what I want to talk to you about is the management I want to put a little bit of a perspective on this first you know as you've heard in our conversation during the panel discussion the world is it's becoming increasingly technologically intense I mean the last 50 years have been remarkable the next 50 years will be astronomical in my judgment in terms of the introduction of new technologies into our into our social fabric now the world's population we all need clean air clean water and clean food palatable food that's those are givens those are fundamental but our standard of living depends on housing and shelter it depends on health care it depends on a dependable infrastructure and it depends on energy for both our homes and our workplace but that that's the way I see the world today there may be other dimensions and I know Asia you had a beautiful chart which I hadn't seen before that incorporated some of this and more which I found very intriguing I'm gonna use that next time but that that's where we're at now so let's take the position that nuclear or electric generation has a place in our since in meeting our electric demand in the United States let's let's take that as a given how many reactors are there in in the United States well this is a figure from your December 2000 and frankly it hasn't changed but what it shows is the number of the number and location of operating plants in the United States in 2000 year 2000 there are roughly 104 operating nuclear power plants in the US right now there are actually 10 less because about 10 of them have been decommissioned or in the process of being decommissioned now that that's a troubling statistic when when President Obama was in office there was a there was a thought that we might be at a stage where there might be a nuclear renaissance people were very interested at that point in history in nuclear or electric generation there there were there were congressional bills the department of energy had given the been given the budget authority to provide loans to utility to build new electric generating plant nuclear electric generating plants none were built there's only one nuclear new nuclear plant which has been under construction forever in Georgia and still not operating I think maybe I don't think maybe getting closer but it's not operating today as far as I know it's vocal in near in your Savannah but in Georgia so you look at this map and you see that they're concentrated largely let's say east of the Mississippi some in California what cup there's a essentially power there's a nuclear power plant called the Washington public power system in the state of Washington I think there are five reactors they're planned for five reactors but this is the distribution today commercial spent fuel that that is another way of describing high-level waste there are roughly 53,000 metric tons of a spent nuclear fuel in the United States today there about 8500 metric tons in dry storage and remember every year a nuclear a nuclear power plant 1,000 megawatt plant produces about 27 metric tons of waste so if you've got about a hundred of them you're producing about another 2,700 metric tons a year the projection is about a year 2035 there will be a about a hundred thousand metric tons of waste in the United States now to give you some perspective I mean this is very dense material it's about the size if you think about this volumetrically it's about the size of a football field and 30 feet deep that sounds like a lot but it's really not that much it sounds astronomical but it isn't but it has to be handled very very carefully and as I say we do not have a policy we do have a policy we don't have a an implemented plan for handling it today at least not in terms of permanent storage the plan was to produce to build a geologic repository and to introduce about 70,000 metric tons 63,000 of which would be commercial spent fuel from nuclear commercial power plants about 7,000 metric tons of defense high level waste that was the plan here's here's where it is today it's stored on site in on where these read there are 67 sites in the United States where these roughly a hundred plants are located in some sites there's more than one reactor but the fuel when it's when a nuclear power plant is refueled the fuel is first been put in what are called spent fuel pools on site and the the the the radio the the chain reaction has stopped the fuel is no longer well not really stopped but it's slowed to the point where it's not commercially useful so even though the fuel is not commercially useful there's still a lot of radioactivity radio radioactive release of gamma rays and fission products that are produced and released so that this store this fuel is stored the bundled the fuel are stored in on site in what are called spent fuel pools and does anyone know that why the water looks blue there any nuclear engineers here what's the answer yeah okay turnip cover radiation you know you could swim in here I don't recommend it but I mean the radiation is high essentially high enough energy that the visible light is towards a the blue end of the spectrum and so that's why it looks blue blue green but it's pretty free of bacteria in the radiation so you could swim in it maybe not your choice after it's cool to a certain point it's put in dry storage this is an example of this was actually taken a picture I took it main Yankee I got permission to take it this is not illegal I can I can show it to you but these are spent these were spent cask on a pad at main Yankee which is in the stage of being decommissioned it's pretty big this gives you a size figure an indication of the scale you can see the woman standing next to it so they're pretty big they're pretty large canisters now what are the issues well first of all the consensus you know when when the world and I mean the world globally began thinking about how do we manage nuclear waste this did start maybe 40 years ago in the United States there was a National Academy Academy committee set up to examine what we should do with the waste so it looked like we were headed in the right direction and they considered deep ocean burial they considered putting it in space you know sending it up in space and they finally decided neither of those are good options in terms of the biosphere so they chose not to do that thank God but they did think that the best possible thing to do is to put it in deep geologic repository to bear it underground and they went about examining I think more more than a dozen different sites in the United States where we're that they thought were potential sites for storage some some of the sites they chose were where there were communities that were agreeable but the sites were not considered to be acceptable many were in places where the sites were acceptable but the public wasn't except wasn't agreeable so it became a clear it was going to be a problem now I showed you this before I mean so you're generating this waste by year 2035 you're gonna have about a hundred thousand metric tons so that current football field with 30 feet probably grows the 50 feet or something like that well where was the best site well it turned out to be in Yucca Mountain Nevada now if you remember the map that I showed you a little while ago let me go back to that there are no nuclear plants in Nevada none huh yeah none in Indiana either you don't want a nuclear waste repository so what did what happened so the people of the people of Nevada and particularly the congressional delegation decided that they they weren't producing nuclear electricity they weren't generating electricity using nuclear power plants why should they serve as the repository for a nuclear waste I well you know interestingly the put the people who lived near Yucca Mountain were not at all upset about this there it's a very deserted place but there are there are population centers around it there's small population center Yucca Mountains about 80 miles from Las Vegas at any rate the congressional delegation at that point did not want to have nuclear waste in Nevada now it also happens this was during President Obama's first term you might remember in his first term during his first year he tried very hard and did pass the Affordable Care Act you might also know that Harry Reid the senator from Nevada was the majority leader in the Senate and I think I think it's common knowledge I don't think this is a secret I think President Obama needed senator Reid support for a affordable care affordable care act oh they're both Democrats but still they had to make a trade if I can't tell you for a fact that they had this conversation but my guess is that the deal that the deal was that if you support the Affordable Care Act and I will support you in opposing putting a nuclear waste economy you know if I were if I were president at that I probably would have made the same choice look the Affordable Care Act it provides care for 30 million people in this country I mean we've waited a long time for a waste repository I suppose we can wait a few more years so you know it is a political decision but we've never gotten back on track here's here's what we here's what we have done in a policy sense in 1970 I guess it was a little off in the timing the federal government at the recommendation of the academies began screening many sites they they deferred on commercial reprocessing why did they do that because you know what what happens with nuclear fuel is that when the the fission products are produced some of the fission products are neutron absorbers and what happens is that they poison the chain reaction in the fuel and so after a relatively short period something like about a year and a half about 18 months of service there is enough fissional fission product a poison in the fuel that you have to you have to either replace it or you have to reprocess it remove the poison that's what the French do you know 70% of French is the French electric demand is met by nuclear power 70% they reprocess the fuel and put it back into service but one of the products of reprocessing fuel is weapons grade plutonium and so President Carter who was president at the time of the decision there was a reprocessing experiment a place called West Valley in New York State which we actually experiment with reprocessing in the United States but President Carter and the administration made a decision that it was not in this country's interest reprocessed because it would produce as a product weapons grade plutonium that could fall into the wrong hands I think that probably once again I think it was a sensible decision the French are very careful about it they're very guarded but you can see the potential problems but in 1982 we did in 1982 40 years ago we passed a nuclear nuclear waste policy act that act said we are going to build based on everything that had been done before that a waste repository deep geologic repository and we're going to begin charging nuclear utilities a fee a waste waste management fund so we're going to start charging you a fee and by 1997 this deep repository will be built and you will be able to deliver your waste to Yucca Mountain guess what didn't happen so this waste fund continued growing by 1997 the utilities start saying well what do we do what do we do at our waste is sitting on our site there was no good answer so the utilities began suing the federal government to recover the cost the funds that they'd put into this nuclear way fund it went it went you know it was a disaster in terms of public policy the policy was there it was not implemented the utilities did what they were supposed to do they paid into this fund but the fund did not provide access to a site where they could store waste here's Yucca Mountain I want you to see just how desolate this is this is 80 miles basically 80 miles north of Las Vegas it's you know it's a pretty desolate place it looks like another planet when you look at these photographs you know it's little pockets of civilization but it's pretty desolate now here you can see some of the construction the this must be a pointer is it oh there it is there is a pointer but I don't I don't know if you can can you see it on a screen okay well let me let me just point out you can see a little bit of construction there that was the beginning of a the building the construction of what's called an exploratory exploratory tunnel and the idea was here's the mountain let's find out what kind of barrier the mountain would be if we were to actually put fuel in it so the Department of Energy which had the responsibility for this started producing they produced an experiment they call it a drift an experimental tunnel five miles long into the mountain about a 1,100 feet above sea level about a thousand feet above the groundwater the ground level of groundwater in Yucca Mountain and they started building and they they you know spend billions of dollars doing experiments at this place this is what it will you know the blue is what it should look like if it were completed it never got to that point the only thing that was ever constructed was the the yellow this is the entry and you can you can kind of see it's called a north portal on the experimental experimental something ESF I forgot when ESF stands for but it's like the experimental tunnel here's the machine which uses produce it pretty whopping big boring machine the industrial engineers will like this right remember maybe the mechanicals even more it's it was amazing I went for a ride inside this tunnel it was great as part of the wasteboards visit to Yucca Mountain we actually toured the entire five miles it wasn't a tour we were working but this is a given idea so you know when you think about this nuclear plant power plants have a 40 year design life they may be licensed maybe let's say a hundred years so you you need you need to think about that when you realize that this is a this shows the this shows what is called a thermal pulse when you when you take nuclear waste and you let's suppose you were actually going to bury it in Yucca Mountain let's suppose it had been built out and you're ready to receive waste depending on the location you would have a low and high temperature as a function of time and so where when you first put the waste in it's very hot it'll stay hot for about 50 or 100 years you will keep the tunnel you will keep the the repository open for that first hundred years so things cool and you get natural ventilation and then you'll close it permanently that was the idea and the thermal pulse will decline there would still be radioactive activity radiant the eclies are being produced gamma rays of neutrons are being produced there's energy released so it's still warm you wouldn't expect any sort of environmental any anything to happen it's dry for the first 10,000 years until you get the boiling point in Yucca Mountain because of the elevation is about 96 degrees centigrade not a hundred but somewhere around 100 degrees that's where the point the thermal pulse begin to reach a point where for the first thousand years is dry you don't have to worry about it it's what happens after that but why is that important how do you how do you design a system the last a thousand years I mean it the design life of nuclear plant at most is a hundred year the operating life most a hundred years well the answer is it's got to be done by probabilistic risk assessment there's no one you can't do experiments that are really meaningful just not possible so there's a you know a lot of the work of the board and the Department of Energy the nuclear waste board of which I was a member and the Department of Energy was focused on PRA's the problem was we had this very long timeline and there were two there were the environmental protection protection agency had the responsibility to decide what was the compliance period and they said well there are two points that are important the first point is what is a lethal dose and they decided that after about 10,000 years of the radioactivity coming from the waste should be such that you would no longer receive a lethal dose but as time progressed and as as these canisters the packaging began to degrade you know the canisters in which the waste was stored then there might be some radio radionuclide release and so up to a million years you had to provide a demonstration that you could make sure the public safety was guaranteed a million years that means how many eons and geologic time frame you know the Department of Energy was actually considering what kind of signage to put at Yucca Mountain what what would another civilization look for as an indication that there's a very very nuclear waste I mean it was so unusual for for a practicing engineer to think about timescales like this hard to believe well I'm gonna I'm gonna cut this short by telling you that let me let me show you a slide here if the only this is the only material science I'm gonna talk about if the only process that occurred was uniform corrosion that is like you put a piece of steel in the atmosphere in a corrosion uniformly the whole surface becomes rusty if that happened to the materials of construction of the waste packages you would get you would see a difference that these two stacks show on the right it shows the thickness of the wall of the alloy being used for the container at time zero and after a million years on the left uniform corrosion is not an issue they would easily last a million years that sounds outrageous but if you use whatever data you can in terms of corrosion rates that are known not for these materials under projected environmental exposure they should last what easily last a million years the problem is localized corrosion and that's where this where things became very tough and I think given the timing I'm gonna I'm just gonna tell you that from the point of view of the Department of Energy they were concerned about localized corrosion because remember after a thousand years the temperature drops to less than a hundred degrees so it's possible for any atmospheric moisture to condense under the right circumstances one of the concerns it has with diluquescence that could occur above the boiling point they were concerned about dust on the packaging being diluquescent so but that's not going to create uniform corrosion localized corrosion and that's where the Department of Energy was concerned but they thought that the characteristic of the dust included not only elements or species that could be corrosive but they could also be protected the dust was analyzed so and the bottom line was they decided they could put packages into this waste this is an this is called an emplacement drift drift meaning tunnel and it would have the spent fuel in packages it would have a shield an emplacement a shield above the packages to protect it from anything that might fall in the ground or anything like that fall on top of it and these are just examples what it would look like it was it was interesting so here's this is the final slide despite the delays yucca mountain is still a viable option it is but due to the delays with repository development large amounts of spent fuel will remain at reactor sites at least in terms probably for the next 50 years unfortunately so reprocessing if we ever get to the point where we reverse the decision made by President Carter then we might have an option to reprocess but there will still be wastes we're not gonna they be different minimalized but this will be waste so the end result is is that we we've got this problem why why haven't we got to the point where we can put this waste into the ground it's because the political process has failed us it really has we've not come back to it as a nation long after affordable care of the Republican and Democratic legislators cannot agree on what to do with yucca mountain they cannot and therefore it stalemated so the countries that I think it puts the country at risk in terms of power demand it puts us at risk in terms of how we manage a very potentially dangerous waste and this is where I come to my challenge I've said time several times today that engineers aren't nearly enough involved in public policy you guys have to run for office and when you do and you get elected you let me know and I will come to your inauguration how's that I'm seeing that joking but I really do mean it you know there are 535 members in the Senate and the House I think you can count on one hand the number who have technical backgrounds in a in a nation which is so technologically intense how does that make sense no I I know you know as as scientists and engines we're very reluctant to get involved in that kind of that that kind of interaction with policymakers there's this there's this famous quote I don't know who it came from maybe Ronald Reagan but it's the quote is something like you can always distinguish a politician from a scientist the politicians are often wrong but never uncertain the scientists do you dub diametric opposite right we all we have lots of uncertainties and therefore you know it's part it's not part of our culture typically to become involved in public policy but frankly we must if we don't get involved then the nation is going to be led a technologically intense nation is going to be led by people who have no technology background I don't I don't want every member of Congress to be a technologist but I'd like to see more than a handful and I you know even if you do not run for a public office elective office there are policymaking positions that you can play in state government in federal government and frankly they're really important so I leave you with that challenge I'm speaking largely to the students I don't want the faculty to leave here but Dean I want I want I want to assure you Dean I do not want your faculty to leave but I do want the students to think about lives that involve public policy okay that thank you very much for being a tenor appreciate thank you I think we have time for questions yes we do indeed have time for questions so we want to make sure again that those who are watching via the live stream to use the chat box for any questions that you have and the chat box is being monitored and questions will be asked on a first come first serve basis while we are trying to stimulate the questions from the live audience and from the online audience I will take privilege to ask the first one okay and I think your discussion discussion of Yucca Mountain is one of the perfect examples of the disconnect between a not just the risk versus consequence but the risk versus timeline so lots of shall we say elected officials work on a two-year or a less timeline and they're trying to make a decision about hundreds of thousands of years which means there's never incentive within any given term yeah to do anything how do you add that to the PRA assessment well I mean I think the first thing you have to recognize is exactly what you've just said I mean in order to make decisions this has to be there have to be people in policymaking and implementation positions who can go beyond a term of a political of an elective position this isn't the four or six year decision and if if we don't get to the point where there are serious in addition you need serious lawmakers you need people who do understand the gravity of what we're dealing with and by gravity I mean the demand for electric generation the concerns about the climate and the need to make decisions and implement them and until we get to the stage where all of those things come together that's why I said I don't know that this will occur in the next 50 years and if it doesn't I don't think we should build any more nuclear power plants thank you we'll start with the student this is actually a little personal because I grew up near the Santa Nofri plant though one of the two in Southern California that closed down after Fukushima because of concerns it was on a fault line what are some things that if we're going to be dealing with on-site storage for the next couple decades what are some things other than you know deep underground storage that these sites are maybe doing to make people nearby feel better what are some of the the security implementations and things we're gonna look forward to that are not directly off-site storage well let me let me say first I think that the very best technology is deep geologic report positive but that could take several different forms I mean for example I mentioned that Yucca mountain the plan was that it would be open for the first hundred years to cool and after that it would be closed permanently the fuel would not be recoverable and yet if we get to the stage in our history where some year or some we'd make the decision we do want to reprocess then that fuel is no longer available if it if it can't be retrieved there are other approaches which look at geologic repository but provide for reclamation recovery if you choose to you if you want to so I think you know a couple of different options but I don't think we're at a stage where we can make any decisions on anything because there's no fundamental agreement on going forward with you know the Congress neither appropriates money or if it does it doesn't it doesn't go ahead and provide the money it's a we're at a we're at a standstill your presentation actually inspired an observation the word waste and just four different ways to quickly came to my mind nuclear waste electronic waste space waste and plastic waste if I connect dots in all four of them there are different types of ways but I think it may have partly partly may have to do with how we start engineer something to build from fundamental bottom up because when we engineer something we don't factor the waste as a part of engineering specification to start with and I think that goes to how we consider the life cycle of a product but not the material we are talking nuclear as a material plastic material space junk as a material and electronic waste which was in many other countries we shipped where it was that we look at the life cycle of a product but not a life cycle of a material and I think that may be one of the opportunities problem is an opportunity just one how would you how would you handle nuclear waste with that perception you made a comment very interesting that in France the 70% of the energy come from nuclear but they do put back a reprocess nuclear field back into the plant yeah that is just a start but good start yeah and that kind of thought process early enough any engineer a material not a product you know material could be beneficial and it's just a thought I'm sure yeah you know I people in the US been aware of that suggestion or it it's technically doable the French do it but but the government of the United States had the balanced the question of producing an excess of weapons grade plutonium and its potential potentially falling into the wrong hands and they had the balance that with the question of a bearing the waste and they made the choice to bury the waste reprocessing is a you know it was I mentioned that there was a reprocessing facility built so I think sometimes in the late 50s or early 60s in West Valley New York they were reprocessing fuel but that but they ultimately got to the point where they realized that they had to make a fundamental decision would they go forward and reprocess all the waste fuel from nuclear nuclear reactor it would surely decrease the volume of waste there would still be waste but it would it would be a different volume than we're talking about you know 27 metric tons a year per a thousand megawatt it would be much different but we had we made the decision on balance not to reprocess you know I'm glad that we can not ship this waste to the other countries because electronic waste we ship to many other countries old ships we have shipped to many other countries they're lying around I'm glad we did not you know that would not yeah I agree thank you yeah yeah we we can we here let's hear I'd be easier if we had a microphone okay okay you're on very good okay so I just have one quick observation and maybe two questions from your presentation so it seems to me that right now we have about 100,000 metric tons of fuel or we're approaching there approaching it yeah and Yacca Mountain was about 70,000 metric tons so it was designed for 70. To me it seems that one Yacca Mountain is not enough anymore so for what we're gonna need to so the question I have is it seems that DOE now is looking to what's called consent-based siting approach which I believe Blue Ribbon Committee also recommended to do maybe you can share your opinion if you think that this approach this new approach that DOE is seeking would be more successful and what do you understand when they say consent. Consent based meaning that the public will have an option to decide whether they want to allow repository to build or not I think conceptually that's a very good idea when I said at the outset that this is largely a political problem it is also a it's a question of public will and political will we know the right now the political will is not there it just isn't happening you know that we've had 60 years to deal with this waste and it still hasn't happened in terms of congressional action and if you look at countries like Sweden they are pretty close to having an operating deep geologic repository I think the Swedes have been very cautious and careful about the way they approach the public in terms of the acceptance of the notion the Finns are close behind they're both they're different repositories in the sense that they're they're planned to be in granite which is a reducing environment Yucca Mountain is actually a porous rock it's actually oxidizing so the canister materials are quite different in in Sweden the canisters can be copper alloys much different alloy compositions but the key is to get public acceptance and that's what the Department of Energy is trying to do with site-based management I don't I don't think they've been very successful I know it's conceptually a good thing that I endorse that a hundred percent I just don't know if it's gonna be successful and in the current divisive world that represents the United States yeah please to see Cherankov radiation I'm sure Cherankov would have been very pleased because he had to spend 25 days conditioning himself because before he could see the radiation he spent 25 days in the dark just observation with respect to your thought about the roles of engineers to become more involved in political thinking and helping others I just point out that almost every professional society as you look at their every professional engineering society as you look at their code of ethics there's a comment in there that says something it's our obligation to help the public better understand and educate the public so I think you know not only just necessarily having to seek out political office but to your point just by being good proponents helping people understand better I think that's something we can all kind of carry forward help people understand problems a little bit better particularly in a time where social media makes it so easy yeah or different you know when I when I when I was in Washington during the year that I that I served as an advisor to the Committee on Science and Technology I met a lot of the people you're talking about the people sponsored by professional societies who worked in congressional offices or in cabinet in cabinet cabinet DOE offices places like that and I think that was a good experience but unfortunately it's a relatively small population and I'll tell you what one of the things that I am most exhilarated by and I don't get exonerated too easy but is this this forum that we did I am a part of in my hometown we we have a group of guys and I should point out there maybe I've said this earlier today but there's some Purdue alums and among this group they're technologists chemical engineers and one's a climatologist I'm not sure where the degree is in but you know we we get together every two weeks we pick a topic for example I'll give you an example which we've been focused a lot on climate change for the last couple of months so we had an expert who is concerned about co2 emissions and sequestration and so on he spoke but we also decided we needed to hear from the other side of the equation people who are climate skeptics so we there's a one of my former MIT colleague a guy named Richard Linzen is actually very skeptical he's not skeptical of the fact that the climate is changing he's skeptical that co2 is responsible for now he gave a talk we heard from someone else who has had the opposite views and what we're gonna try to do is to have a public debate on that issue I mean this a public for the whole town not just a small group of science and technology folks and we're gonna people are willing to do this because we think it's so important for the community to understand that part of technology what is important for you looking forward we don't want it to you know we don't want to be any more political than it has to be so we're gonna try to get focused on is carbon dioxide responsible we know there are climate oscillations that occur naturally with a cycle of something like 10,000 years the real question is our atmospheric contaminants produced from our and tropic industries are they producing emissions that are adding to the excel that are accelerating climate change that's a question we do know as engineers that there are symptoms that we have to deal with sea levels rising that's a fact you know we're gonna start losing our coastal cities in the maybe in the next 50 years what is New York shoreline gonna look like so we have to I think it's important that we begin thinking about the consequences of what's occurring rather than pointing fingers at what's who's responsible you know is it is it industry is it industry is because we're producing CO2 with our from our the emissions of fossil steam generator electric generators but we got to deal with it but my point is we're trying to engage the public I know I think if communities all over the country started doing something like that that could be important I know we're just we're just beginning to do this but I really get excited these guys are you know the really wonderful people they're not all guys they're women too they're it really is a cross-section in many respects of our town and we're trying to engage the public in scientific conversation and I don't I I don't know how to deal it it's it's a tough problem but I do think it's important for though anyone who has got an inclination to get involved in public policy I you got my support thank you Marsha do we have anything on why I I'm going to to borrow something from the last panel yeah and bring it in here I think it was professor Kim who said something about all these science fiction stories from from prior eras and given the level of public understanding of science yeah that may be the level of understanding that most of the population has about these issues given that what would you say would be the role of your technologist groups to actually create if you will science fiction stories about what happens in these environments so I can imagine a short term one based on the headline MIT in exile Cambridge campus evacuates yeah do the sea level rise it's only about four feet above sea level no it's true yeah but how would you write a science fiction story about one of these oh we we forgot to bury this stuff you know you raise a really interesting point I remember being in Japan at about the time that people discovered the high temperature superconducting magnets the oxide magnets and I'm sitting on the subway car with a Japanese friend and I'm looking across at a kid reading a magazine and it's a magazine that was it was like a comic book that had a lot of illustrations about superconducting magnets and levitated trains and I thought that was really ingenious that that could be you know maybe maybe this is the way that I mean if you consider magazines or social media as a vehicle for providing some common good that might be a way this is not disinformated that I got a hold of one of these magazines and brought it home because I was you know some of my friends at MIT were very involved in the evolution of a company called American Superconductor based on all that I brought to so many gave it to me look this is what the Japanese kids are reading you there was nothing like that in this country and I was so impressed but I like what you're saying I mean you know we need to reach people at the at the right age and at the right level and these kids are absolutely absorbed so that's a very interesting thought it's a beginning it's a beginning so if there are no other questions I believe we've come to the end of pedals from the Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series I've gotten the sense that he really doesn't want me to do this but I want to express my utmost appreciation to Professor Chandrasekhar Chandy yeah for putting these things together I can't agree more yes absolutely I need I need to say just a few words about it I've known Chandy for a long time back when Dale Condit with Dale Compton was here and some of my Mark Marietta friends who knew Dale and introduced me to him but we have a mutual interest in things related to environmental effects on mechanical behavior he wants he's shown me that he can apply it to things like metal cutting I'm interested in it from the point of view of an environmentally induced fracture in well for example a nuclear steam generator tube but the coincidence in application to something like metal cutting on the one hand and environmental exposure of engineering materials at the end it's magnificent so we we are working very hard to develop a collaboration that I hope will bring me on to this campus many times in the next few years so I'm looking forward to it I gotta tell you I had a great day here that I had wonderful visits with your faculty this morning got some more tomorrow but I especially I had a great visit with students I said I know some of murder in the room but you guys have some great students here you really do we just had we could have gone on for hours you know we had to stop because my calendar said I had to be somewhere else but I I just want to tell you how impressed I am by what I've seen in my day here and I mean I've been here a couple of occasions before but I'm looking forward to coming back so Chandy I thank you for that it's great to have your collaboration friendship and it is friendship I've known him for a long time he's not just a colleague he's a friend so thank you thank you thank you and thank you for that um endorsement of what we've come to want to call the pinnacle of excellence at scale there you go thanks again everyone for attending and we'll talk to you again yeah thank you thank you