Charles W. 'Chuck' Bryant

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.

So it's really just a blip of radioactivity that decays in that two to five years.

But what they're really doing is cooling that stuff down

Because if they even pulled it out to transport it and didn't do so in a canal, it seems like it would just combust, right?

Isn't that the idea?

That's very funny to me that you keep liking it to throwing it out back in a pile.

So for the first couple of decades that we had this stuff, all of it was just in those cooling pools.

But those pools started to fill up.

They're all on site.

It's not like they have to transport them, except very locally via canal.

And then they said, hey, these pools are filling up.

We've got to come up with a better way.

They started looking into the dry cask method in the 70s, and I think in 86 –

in the United States at the Surrey Nuclear Power Plant in Virginia is where we had our first dry storage facility.

And these casks are about 20 feet tall, eight feet in diameter, weigh about 100 tons.

And in that cask is several dozen of those fuel assemblies.

And again, those fuel assemblies are made up of

the individual fuel rods that are holding the pellets.

So several dozen of those stack together, sealed inside a canister, they bolt it shut, suck out the air and replace it with inert gas, and then that steel canister is surrounded by a thick concrete wall and they throw it out back.