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My photo kissing a nuclear waste cask went viral and people had… opinions about it. There was outrage, with many claiming it was dangerous and that I was hurting my future children (lol). Here’s why kissing a nuclear waste cask is actually fine🧵 <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/isabelleboemeke/status/1869770868353859808" color="blue">x.com/isabelleboemek…</a>
The waste people are concerned about and say remains dangerously radioactive forever is called “spent fuel.” Contrary to popular belief, spent fuel doesn’t look like neon green slime. I know, shocker. It looks exactly like the fuel that goes into the reactor in the first place: Just a bunch of ceramic pellets, lined up inside very long metal rods that are bundled together.
When fresh fuel goes into a reactor, it stays there for about 18 to 20 months making electricity. After that, it becomes less efficient and needs to be replaced. That’s when it becomes spent fuel. The problem is that spent fuel is super radioactive and hot. We can’t just toss it anywhere, it needs to be managed safely. So, what do we do with it?
The first step is to move it from the reactor into a pool called a… wait for it… spent fuel pool. It’s just like a normal, but very deep, pool and every nuclear power plant has one. The spent fuel stays in there for at least 5 years, cooling down.
On top of cooling the spent fuel down, the water in the pool is also great at blocking radiation. So much so that if you fell in it, but stayed close to the surface, you’d be totally fine. You’d need to swim very close to the spent fuel itself to get a dangerous dose of radiation.
🚨Side note: please don’t try to jump in a spent fuel pool. You’ll get arrested. This is just to show that even at its most radioactive stage, it’s very easy to protect people from spent fuel.
After years chilling in the pool, spent fuel is ready for its next stage. That’s when it’s moved into big concrete and steel canisters called dry casks.
Dry casks are so safe that you can kiss one without being concerned about getting a meaningful dose of radiation. That’s because thick slabs of concrete can block even the most radioactive stuff.
But I didn’t just blindly trust that the dry cask was blocking radiation from the spent fuel. When visiting a dry cask storage, you have to wear a dosimeter, a little device that tracks how much radiation you’re getting. After walking between casks and literally kissing one several times, I got a dose of 0.8 millirem or 4/10 of a dental X-ray. Insignificant.
Lots of people worry about what happens to these casks in case of, let’s say, an earthquake. The truth is that they’ve been tested for pretty much *anything*, including having a train slam against one, and they survived every time. Check it out.
So, yeah, turns out the fear people have about nuclear waste comes from cartoons or straight up misinformation. In reality, spent fuel should be the gold standard for waste management. It’s the only industry that knows exactly where every ounce of waste is, and it stays safely contained. Try saying that about any other type of waste.
