Charles W. 'Chuck' Bryant

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.

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.