Charles W. 'Chuck' Bryant

I thought we did one just on creating nuclear energy, no?

All right.

Well, we'll go over it quickly again, just how it works, because it works how creating energy works at a coal plant or a natural gas plant, because what you're essentially trying to do is boil water to produce steam, and that steam turns a turbine.

But in this case, the fuel is not coal or natural gas.

It's these little uranium-235 pellets.

Like I said, sort of a half of a thumb size.

And you mentioned fuel assembly.

A fuel assembly, well, you get these little pellets.

You put them inside these long fuel rods, and then you bundle together those fuel rods, and those are the fuel assemblies.

And depending on the size of the reactor and the type, there's anywhere from 150 to about 800 of those bundled up cylindrical fuel rods as fuel assemblies in the reactor core.

Yeah, yeah, it's been going on for a long time.

The thing is, you know, these things wear out, which is why we have to remove, you know, once you spin that fuel, just like a lump of coal would get spent.

You got to do the same with the nuclear stuff.

So every, I think, five or six years, it can go before it's basically on empty, but it's not on empty, as we'll see, because there's still a little bit of juice left, just not enough to power sort of the old school reactors.

Right, right.

So every year and a half to two years, a nuclear reactor is going to close the doors and they're going to cycle through about a third of their fuel assemblies and get rid of those.

And that is the really high level nuclear waste that is the most concerning and the stuff that we need to be the most judicious with.

Yeah, you can look up a picture of a spent fuel pool, and it's really cool looking.

And like you said, I mean, two to five years just for these things to cool off.

They decay a little bit as far as the radioactivity goes, but that's a process that, for the most critical stuff, that takes thousands of years.