How Do We Deal with Nuclear Waste?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 November 2018
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How should we tackle the biggest clean-up job in history? Listener Michelle from Ireland sends CrowdScience to investigate what to do with years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel. Most of the highly toxic waste is a by-product from nuclear power production and the stockpiles across the world continue to grow. “Could we blast it into the sun? Dilute it across the continent? Or should we bury it?” Michelle asks.
We travel deep into the Finnish bedrock to visit what could be its final resting place and speak to the scientists who are securing the facility many ice-ages into the future. The nastiest stuff in the waste soup needs to stay put for thousands of years before it becomes safe. No man-made structure has ever before lasted so long. The Finnish solution is not easy to replicate in other countries as communities oppose nuclear waste being permanently buried in their backyard.
Presenter Marnie Chesterton discovers that scientists have come up with solutions that could let us recycle the spent fuel more effectively, but it costs more than the industry is willing to spend. The clean-up job of the century comes down to dollars and not science.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton Producer: Louisa Field
(Photo: a man in protective workwear in waste factory. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and maybe it's when I had a hand in. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm Tammy Walker and I produce podcasts for the BBC. |
| 0:08.0 | My role is to give new and diverse creators a voice with the opportunity to build a career. |
| 0:12.0 | That's the thing I love about podcasts. |
| 0:14.4 | You start with just a good idea, but then you have the space to see where it goes. |
| 0:18.4 | And doing that at the BBC means we can really run with the best stories |
| 0:21.9 | while developing the most unique audio talent. |
| 0:24.3 | So if you like what you hear, why not check out the huge range of podcast we've got on BBC |
| 0:29.1 | Sounds. |
| 0:30.1 | There's quite an echo. |
| 0:32.1 | Marnie Chesterton, what are? There's quite an echo. |
| 0:36.0 | Marni Chesterton, what are you doing? |
| 0:40.0 | Well, there's a massive copper canister here, and I thought I'd get in it, because I'm childish but mainly because I wanted to give crowd science |
| 0:46.6 | listeners a sense of the scale of this thing. |
| 0:50.5 | I can sit up in here and it's about six meters long and it's going to be filled with |
| 0:56.8 | nuclear waste and buried in the ground eventually. |
| 1:00.8 | You're listening to Crowd Science from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:07.0 | We are the science show that turns your questions into audio adventures, |
| 1:12.0 | and this particular adventure |
| 1:13.7 | involves heading half a kilometer underground in a remote part of Finland |
| 1:18.0 | because today we're tackling one of the biggest cleanup jobs in history, nuclear waste. |
| 1:25.0 | We've generated a lot of it, mostly as a byproduct of the nuclear power industry. |
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