Joshua (Josh) Clark

It enters the food chain, and it causes all sorts of problems when it enters the body.

And it sticks around for a while.

It's one of the big problems with nuclear waste.

So you want to keep those spent fuel assemblies underwater.

for basically as long as you possibly can before you put them into basically dry dock.

And this is where, essentially what I was saying, where they just toss them out back.

That's what they do, but they put them into something called a dry cask first.

And it's a little more technical than just throwing it into a pile, but it's in principle roughly the same thing.

Because that's what they're doing, man.

Like these dry casks, it goes from a pool to a dry cask on the same site.

And they just sit there in the dry cask like, okay, you stay here until we can figure out what to do with you 100 years from now.

Right.

They stand it up out back.

And the inert gas acts as a coolant rather than using water, which would corrode things.

The inert gas can also absorb the radiation and the heat.

And then the concrete they use is like very special concrete with polymer fibers and added boron to make it even denser.

And then they also mix in magnetite and barite to essentially absorb radioactive particles.

So it's like the dry casks are pretty, pretty good.

As far as I know, though, they're only rated for about 100 years of storage.

After that, they're like, we're not guaranteeing anything.