Nuclear waste.
The worst type of garbage for raccoons to get into.
Now, it's a substance that we all know is dangerous
thanks to movies like this.
NARRATOR:
accident and fell into a bag of nuclear waste.
Melvin became The Toxic Avenger,
the first superhero born out of nuclear waste.
-His face is so terrifying...
NARRATOR:
You'll have to see the movie for yourself.
Honestly, you really don't need to see the movie, 'cause...
his face isn't really that terrifying. This is it.
I mean it's bad, but its-- it's so ugly,
it's almost cute again.
It's like-- it's like someone melted a candle shaped
-like a pug. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
But-- but the point here is
nuclear waste, the radioactive and toxic byproducts
from making nuclear energy and weapons is
a serious health hazard, and America has a lot of it.
ANCHOR:
stranded at the nation's 104 reactors.
Put all those spent fuel rods together,
and you get a pile as big as a football field
and more than 20 feet tall.
Or you could put them in a pile as big
as two football fields and ten feet tall
or half a football field and 40 feet tall.
Or 20 football fields, one foot tall.
The point is, we have a lot of nuclear waste and it's very fun
-to play with. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
And look, that is just the waste from nuclear energy.
We also have more than 100 million gallons
of hazardous liquid waste from producing weapons.
And you may live closer to nuclear waste than you think.
One out of three Americas lives within 50 miles
of high level nuclear waste.
Some of which, like plutonium, is lethally dangerous,
and will be-- will be around for an incredibly long time.
NARRATOR:
if ingested, are deadly.
One of the characteristics of it is it has
an extremely long half-life.
Plutonium 239, for example, has a half life
of about 24,000 years.
It's true, 24,000 years and that just scratches the surface.
It takes ten half-lives for plutonium to become harmless
so that's 240,000 years.
A unit of time more commonly known as one English patient.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
And as any adult with an American girl doll collection
eventually finds out, if you wanna keep something
around for a disturbingly long time, you have got to find
an appropriate place to put it.
"I cannot live with your murder dolls anymore.
Felicity stares at me while I sleep!
She stares at me!"
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS, CHEERS) -"She stares unblinking!"
And look,
I'm not the first person to make this point.
Look at this news report from 1990.
NARRATOR:
after nuclear power was harnessed,
there still is no agreement on where to store the waste.
"We have built the house," said one critic,
"and forgotten the toilets."
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -A home...
with no toilets. Or as a realtor selling a Brooklyn loft
is calling it right now, "artisanal composting."
Wait.
You're suggesting that I shit in that potted plant
while you and I both know that I will do that
'cause this is convenient to public transport,
and has both northern and eastern exposures.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
But look, it-- it has been 27 years since that clip
and our country still doesn't have a nuclear toilet.
And that is our subject tonight.
Why do we not have a nuclear toilet?
And it's actually easy to understand how we got
into this situation. Because during World War Two,
we rushed to develop nuclear weapons because we were trying
to defeat the Nazis,
who, fun fact, pretty much all Americans agreed were bad
-at the time. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
Anyway, the-- the thing is,
we didn't really have a plan on what to do
with all the radioactive byproducts that we produced.
And this initially led us
to some mind-blowingly stupid solutions.
For instance, for years, we actually did this...
MAN:
radioactive waste and it was in barrels, 55 gallon barrels,
of, uh, radioactive waste with concrete poured over it.
It's funny, the ocean don't glow out there
outside of Red Bank, New Jersey. (CHUCKLES)
Really. 'Cause we dumped a lot of barrels out there.
-(AUDIENCE GASPS) -That is true.
We didn't just dump barrels of radioactive waste
in the ocean, we did it off the coast of New Jersey.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
That is so horrifying!
I'm surprised that
MTV series, and not the name of a harrowing documentary.
An entire generation of children was born without thumbs,
a phenomenon known to locals as...
-"The Situation." -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
And, incidentally,
not all of those barrels sank. In fact, in 1957,
when two barrels were caught floating off the shore,
naval aircraft were summoned to strafe them
with machine-gun fire until they sank.
That's right.
They shot barrels full of nuclear waste
with machine guns!
That's got to be one of the most terrifying sentences ever said
out loud, right after,
"Donald Trump is the president now,"
and, "Wait, wasn't Felicity on a different shelf
when we went to bed last night?
Oh, my God! Felicity is a waking nightmare!"
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
Oh!
Well, the truth is, tossing barrel-fulls of nuclear waste
into the ocean and shooting them
with machine guns is actually preferable to at least
one genuine other idea that was thankfully rejected,
and that was blasting it into space.
A concept with a pretty clear flaw.
WOMAN:
we don't have a great record
with getting rockets out into the atmosphere.
If any one of them blew up,
that would basically contaminate
a large portion of the Earth with radioactive material.
(STUDIO AUDIENCE LAUGHING)
WOMAN:
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -Yeah.
You're right. That's probably not a great idea.
I mean, a really great idea would be also filling
the rockets up with confetti, so at least that way
if there's a horrific accident, there's also a party!
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
Now, over the years, we have dumped nuclear waste all over
the country and in many places, there've been frightening leaks.
Take the Savannah River Site in South Carolina,
where waste from poorly-stored material leaked
into the ground water.
And just watch this alarmingly laid back man explain
the consequences of that.
MAN:
(STUDIO AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
MAN:
-(ALLIGATOR HISSING) -(CLANGING)
MAN:
there's gonna be radioactive alligators.
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -Yeah.
Radioactive alligators!
They even have names,
Tritagator and Dioxinator,
after two of the wastes that poisoned them.
And that's actually very clever,
because if I had to give them names,
I don't know, I'd probably have gone with something like,
(SCREAMS) "Holy Shit! A Fucking Radioactive Alligator!"
And, "Oh No, Fuck Me, There's Another One!
What Nightmare Hath God Wrought?"
And it's not just reptiles who've been impacted
by nuclear waste. Researchers are now studying
an area in North St. Louis County, Missouri,
where tons of waste from the Manhattan project was
improperly stored, some near a creek
that winds through residential communities,
and people who live there have noticed some alarming trends.
JENELL WRIGHT:
with people from high school...
And we all immediately started noticing that so many
of us were sick. We've discovered that
the Department of Veterans Affairs
officially recognizes around 21 cancers associated with exposure
to ionizing radiation, and compared that list
to what we had.
We had all of those cancers, every single one.
That is an incredibly depressing thing to discover
on Facebook and it's-- it's hard to know how to respond.
I mean, you definitely don't want to use
the "like" button, because...
then it looks like you really like the fact
they just got cancer.
Now, there is that new sad emoji,
which would really be perfect
if you hadn't already cheapened it by using it to respond
to the news that Chris Pratt and Anna Faris were separating.
I mean, it is sad. It is sad. But it is not "21-cancer" sad.
It's "nine-cancer" sad. Tops.
The point is, thankfully, 60 years ago,
our government and the scientific consensus
came up with a solution.
In 1957, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report
urging the creation of a permanent storage facility
deep underground. Basically, a nuclear toilet.
And while we did build a repository
for lower-level waste in New Mexico,
we still haven't built one
for the most dangerous, high-level waste.
And, as a result, it's essentially been left
wherever it was made. Which is not good,
because those facilities were not built
with the idea that they would be storing waste indefinitely.
So, to continue the toilet metaphor,
we've basically been shitting in bags,
leaving them all over the house,
and praying that they don't leak.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
And the most frightening example of this is
the Hanford Site in Washington state,
which created two third of the plutonium
in the US arsenal and is currently storing
56 million gallons of highly toxic
and radioactive waste underground.
And over the years,
there have been so many issues at Hanford,
that they've achieved a dubious honor,
as one local new-station reported,
with an almost prideful tone.
ANCHOR:
Western Hemisphere isn't at a polluting factory
or an old chemical plant.
It's right here in Washington State.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) Oh!
"It's right here! We did it guys!
Washington State, home to the most contaminated place
in the Western Hemisphere,
thousands of acres of apple orchards,
and several of Ted Bundy's grizzliest murders. We did it!
Right here!"
There have been a string of problems at Hanford,
from explosions, to toxic vapor releases,
to over a million gallons of waste
leaking out of their tanks over the years.
It has been so bad, the government has had
to pay out nearly one and a half billion dollars
in compensation to thousands of workers for illnesses
stemming from exposure to radiation
and toxic chemicals there.
A local news station has done a series of reports
on Hanford, and after a tunnel collapse this May,
they found some of the infrastructure there is
almost comically badly put together.
ANCHOR:
in the dangerous state of the tunnels.
They're 55 and 60 years old,
well beyond their expected life span.
In addition, wood beams holding up the tunnels are eroding,
and what corrodes timber beams? Radiation.
Yeah!
You can't build something out of wood and expect it
to last forever. You're supposed to have learned that
from the second dumbest of the Three Little Pigs.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
Hanford... Hanford is a gigantic problem.
And even though it hasn't produced anything for 30 years,
the Department of Energy still spends
nearly two and a half billion dollars a year
on cleaning it up, which is close to ten percent
of its annual budget.
And it is pretty weird
to find out that a place you just heard about
is getting that much of the DOE's money.
It's like finding out that half the Department of Agriculture
budget goes to this moose named Gordon.
I mean, I don't know the right amount,
-but that seems like a lot. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
And in case you're thinking, "Well I'm definitely glad that
I don't live near Hanford,"
remember there are nuclear power plants storing waste
all over the country, lots of it in so-called
"spent fuel pools."
That's where nuclear fuel rods are supposed to be
temporarily placed to cool down,
and then put into dry containers,
and then moved
to permanent underground storage sites.
But remember, we don't have one of those.
And in many places those pools are just accumulating
more and more rods.
And while experts say it's highly unlikely,
if a Fukushima-like accident happens at one of those,
the results could be catastrophic.
ANCHOR:
including the Indian Point plant just outside of New York City.
If any one of those were to have
a severe spent fuel pool accident,
you're taking away a lot of big cities,
a lot of farm lands, a lot of the United States,
for decades, perhaps centuries.
That's right, lots of big cities.
New York, Hartford, Boston.
And that last one is a real shame,
'cause as I understand it, they only just got
un-racist yesterday.
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -So...
I mean, at least they could get to enjoy their new life.
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -So...
So, look, it is pretty clear we need to find
a permanent facility to store our most dangerous waste.
And 30 years ago, we actually settled on a site,
Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
Congress passed a law designating it
as our sole candidate for waste storage.
Now since then, we've spent 15 billion dollars
prepping the site,
as you can see from this rather upbeat video.
NARRATOR:
northwest of Las Vegas,
Yucca mountain is the most thoroughly researched site
of its kind in the world.
Experts throughout the world agree that the most
feasible and safe method
for disposing of highly radioactive materials
is to store them deep underground.
That's right. The best place
to put nuclear waste is in a hole deep underground.
Much like Felicity.
Wait. Wait, if she's not there, where is she?
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -Ah, Jesus fucking Christ!
Fuck me!
Jesus! Fucking-- Get the fuck away!
(PANTING)
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDING)
(PANTING)
-(AUDIENCE CHEERS) -It's alright. It's okay.
I'm fine.
It's fine.
The point is...
So, Yucca mountain is our permanent storage site.
So the problem is solved, right? Well, no!
Because while the site has been deemed safe,
and the people in the immediate area,
Nye County, actually support the project,
many Nevadans elsewhere in the state
really don't want it.
And their former senator, Harry Reed, lobbied hard,
eventually managing to get Yucca shot down.
Now, to be fair, he did have an alternative plan
for all the states sitting on their nuclear waste,
but to put it mildly,
it was not exactly scientifically-sound.
Leave it on site, where it is.
Leave it where it is, and dry cast storage containers.
If you were smart, what you would do is, uh...
leave this...
leave it where it is.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
"If you're smart, what you would do is leave
the thing where it is" is terrible advice
for dealing with nuclear waste.
Although, it is coincidentally
the title of Britain's bestselling book on parenting.
-But... But... -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
Here... Here is the truth.
the scientific consensus for decades
has been that leaving it where it is is a really bad idea.
The shutted power plant at San Onofre, in California,
is storing nuclear waste, and it's on a fault line
right next to the ocean.
And that sounds like something you learn
in the first scene of a movie starring The Rock
that you watch on a plane.
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -And look,
maybe Yucca is the best place
to store our growing supply of radioactive garbage.
Maybe it's not.
I am not a nuclear scientist. I just have the face of one.
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -And... And our--
Our new energy secretary, Rick Perry...
yes, Rick Perry...
has said that he is optimistic about fixing
the whole problem, which does sound great.
Although, he didn't exactly do a great job
at dealing with this disaster.
♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
(STUDIO AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
Yeah, that was him on
and on the basis of that, managing volatile energy
is not really his forte.
But here's the thing. We've been saying
that we are going to fix this for decades now,
and we seem to be no closer to a solution.
And let me show you something
that really drove that fact home to us,
because we've been researching this story
for a couple of weeks now, and just yesterday afternoon,
we stumbled on a TV special from 1977,
the year that I was born.
♪ (MUSIC PLAYING) ♪
NARRATOR:
Danger! Radioactive Waste.
Yeah, this problem is so old
they reported on it back when the news was kept
in an America-shaped vault that you had to open
with a crank.
As we watched that yesterday, we gradually
and chillingly realized that by pure coincidence
it hits every beat of the story that we just told you.
It opens with footage of sailors throwing barrels
into the ocean.
It looks at the facilities at Hanford.
It talks about radiation's impact on workers
and on families who live nearby.
And while it doesn't have a radioactive alligator,
it does have radioactive cows.
Which is-- which is still good. Although,
I did prefer our alligator.
I liked it when he went... (HISSES)
-(AUDIENCE LAUGHS) -But--
But the most chilling moment
in that documentary might be the one where they sit down
with someone in authority, and demand to know
exactly when this will be fixed.
NARRATOR:
you get answers like this.
WOMAN: What's the realistic time table?
Realistic time table is scheduled to have
a repository in operation by 1985,
with the selection of the sites by the end of 1978
for detailed work.
Exactly.
Nuclear waste is a problem we were supposed to have dealt
with in the 1980's and still cannot solve,
much like this Rubik's Cube that I always carry with me.
You are my Jean Valjean, cube, and, one day,
-I shall defeat you. -(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
And at the end of that special, remember,
40 years ago, the correspondent delivers this special message.
The waste increases every minute.
The solution of where to put it is years away.
And none of the previous solutions has worked.
We are accustomed in this country to act
only in times of crisis.
But with nuclear waste,
when the crisis comes, it will be too late.
And that was from four decades ago.
We have already waited way too long to resolve this issue.
And we are dancing with trouble here.
So if any one says the government
can just continue to wait,
they are much like a house with no toilet.
Absolutely full of shit.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS, APPLAUDS)