Joshua (Josh) Clark

Yeah.

There's also transuranic waste, which has incredibly long half-lives.

And these are often called defense wastes because they are produced when we produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Yeah.

So, sometimes plutonium grabs onto some of the neutrons we've bombarded with and says, oh, let me form some neptunium, which has a half-life of 2.14 million years.

Or how about some americium?

Or plutonium-239 itself has a half-life of greater than 24,000 years.

So, this stuff is really...

It's really dangerous, but at the same time, it also is really fissile, meaning it's ready to go.

Hit me with some more neutrons and let's split some more atoms so we can release some more energy.

So it's not necessarily a problem if we can figure out what to do with it.

It's just that we haven't quite figured out how to use it yet.

So in the meantime, it gets dropped into the waste isolation pilot plant

And for longtime listeners of the podcast, are those curious enough to go through the back catalog, which is really great.

We did an episode on nuclear semiotics.

Remember that?

Oh, yeah.

Which is essentially trying to figure out how to communicate with people 10,000 years in the future that the waste isolation pilot plant is really dangerous and to steer clear of it.

That was probably one of my favorite all-time episodes.

If you include the short stuff, it's coming up on like twenty three hundred, I think.