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BBC Inside Science

The Continuing Story of the Nuclear Waste Bill

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.51.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 February 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Whilst energy prices are shooting up due to gas demand, in the UK the plans for the next generation nuclear reactors are moving ahead. The costs of eventually decommissioning these, and the spent fuel products they will create is all part of the new contract. But what is to be done, and how far have we got with the 70 years of legacy waste piling up in the UK? Claire Corkhill of Sheffield university helps advise the government about nuclear waste disposal. As she tells Marnie, it's a long-term problem that must be dealt with some day, and even future nuclear fusion plants will have radioactive parts when they need replacing. You may feel that spring seems to come earlier each year. Ulf Buntgen and colleagues at the University of Cambridge have been using data from "Nature's Catalogue", a database of observations going back as far as the c18 to determine the dates each year that certain species of UK native plants first flower. And they have found a clear signal that plants are indeed flowering earlier due to climate change, some as much as a month earlier, on average, since the pre-1986 average. Aaron Rice of Cornell University speaks fish. But not fluently. His field of marine bioacoustics is growing fast. The oceans are, it seems, babbling with fish and other animal chatter. But does everything down there make a noise? In a paper published recently his team have traced evolutionary patterns in the ray-finned fish (which means nearly all the things most people would think of as a fish) and found that the ability to produce fishy sounds, be it bone vibrations, swim bladder vibrations or various other techniques, has likely emerged 33 times in this clade alone. Such convergent evolutionary history clearly suggests a strong selective pressure to do so. Aaron describes how much work there is to be done listening to fish, and how it can be used to help find out how life works, and how it may help us preserve it. Presented by Marnie Chesterton Producer Alex Mansfield Assistant Producer Emily Bird Made in association with The Open University

Transcript

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to make sense of the present day, join me on this journey by pressing play.

0:24.4

Before you get stuck into this episode, I want to tell you about some changes we're making

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to where you can find this podcast. From next month, you can hear Inside Science 28 days before

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anyone else for free on BBC Sounds. If you haven't already, you can download the BBC Sounds app

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1:00.1

Just search for Inside Science, subscribe, and you'll get brand new episodes in the My Sones

1:05.9

section of the app every week. I told you it was easy. No, let's get back to the podcast.

1:16.6

Well done for your excellent taste in downloading Inside Science first broadcast on the 3rd of February 2022.

1:23.0

I'm Marnie Chesterton, and coming up, it's only February and yet spring seems to be springing,

1:28.7

which may be very welcome, but what's going on? Also, energy prices are set to get a lot more

1:33.7

expensive from today. Nuclear energy is touted as part of the future decarbonised energy supply,

1:39.7

but what are the plans for all the radioactive waste? And get a load of this to not adjust your set.

1:47.0

Stay tuned to find out what on earth is making that noise as I find out about an emerging

1:55.5

speciality in bioacoustics. But first, the cost of energy in all its forms is in the news right now.

2:02.8

Last Friday, the government announced it was putting up £100 million to support the planned

2:08.1

size well-seen nuclear plant in Suffolk. If it ends up being built, it will provide 7% of the UK's

2:14.4

energy needs. It will also add to the stockpile of radioactive staff we need to process.

2:20.8

Managing waste is written into the contract for any new nuclear power plant, but it made me wonder,

...

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