Shadowing Practice: The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste - Learn English Speaking with Video

nuclear power nuclear power nuclear power nuclear waste nuclear waste nuclear waste

okay i need to show you something this is a nuclear

reactor built in 1962 the atomic power plant of the future being developed by argon national laboratory

but it's not just any old nuclear reactor this reactor is different in many ways from the nuclear power plants

that supply some of our homes today with electricity the biggest difference was the fuel they used to make electricity.

This nuclear reactor made electricity out of nuclear waste.

Nuclear waste.

Some kind of nuclear waste.

Well sir, where should we dump this batch?

When I think of nuclear waste, I think of that classic glowing green goo in yellow barrels, you know?

This radioactive stuff that we end up with after all of the fuel is used up

that we have to store for hundreds of thousands of years because it's so dangerous.

Like, we fight about nuclear waste all the time.

We say, can we even use nuclear

because we end up with this radioactive waste

and where should we store it and not near my house

and you're telling me that there's a nuclear reactor

that can make electricity out of nuclear waste and it was built in the 1960s?

Back then they were predicting that we would use this technology to build this incredible clean energy future.

By the year 2000 more than half the electric power of the country will come from atomic sources.

But today we're nowhere close to that.

We don't reuse any of our nuclear waste, instead it just piles up.

But if this technology works that means

that our nuclear waste isn't radioactive trash it's an incredible clean energy resource

and it's just sitting there sucking up money to keep it safe we think about technology as constantly moving forward

but this is a story about how we left behind a technology

that could change our energy future

so this video is about what happened to using nuclear waste to make electricity to the clean energy future

that we could have had but more importantly this video is about the people trying to bring that future back.

Nuclear waste.

Nuclear waste problem.

The concern about nuclear energy.

There are concerns about emissions.

Abundant power.

We need clean energy.

Energizes the city.

We are coming up with new nuclear reactors

that will guarantee a plentiful supply of atomic power for the nation and the world for centuries to come.

I first got obsessed with this topic

because a couple of weeks ago my friend

and fellow video journalist johnny harris called me up

and he asked me for some help on a video

that he was making all about nuclear power let's do this

i'm going to go down the rabbit hole on why people are afraid of nuclear energy what are the events

and the things that freak us all out and i kind of want you to do the opposite

to look at like is there a future for this technology

and should we actually be as afraid as we are

so i started to dig into it

and as part of my research process into nuclear power i got invited to go visit one of the largest

and oldest national research centers in the United States.

Here we are.

This is Argonne National Laboratory.

We're going to get to go see the research that they're doing.

And they have been doing research on nuclear power since like before I was born.

Hold on.

Do you recognize that name?

Argonne National Laboratory.

Yeah.

This is the same national lab that developed that incredible old nuclear waste recycling reactor.

But I didn't know that yet.

So we go on this incredible tour.

It's awesome.

I'm learning a ton.

I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm going to be so over prepared to talk to Johnny about nuclear power.

And on this tour with me are these two people from Oklo, which is a company that's working on new kinds of nuclear reactors.

And at the end of the tour, I'm sitting with them under this big tree.

And one of them says something that just short circuits my brain.

So we're actually working with Argonne closely on how to recycle existing nuclear waste in the U .S.

There is enough used fuel to power the country for the next 150 years.

Wait, I'm sorry, what?

There is enough used fuel in the country, in the US alone, to generate power for the country for the next 150 years.

There's enough used fuel, meaning nuclear waste, in the US to power the country for 150 years.

Like you can see me not believing her.

I think it's some fake math.

Like maybe technically there's enough energy there, but like we could never really use it.

We don't know how to do that.

Whereas like when they say, you know, geothermal, you can power the earth for like thousands of years

if we could get all of the energy out of the

earth it's like yeah we can't we don't know how to do

that do we know how to yeah we just don't have the facility commercial facility to do

so but the technology is there experts differ on the exact number of years here

but they agree

that the nuclear waste we have now could be used as a large energy source based on technology

that we've already built but it gets even better if you reuse

that nuclear waste especially

if you reuse it more than once you can dramatically cut down on the amount of time

that the waste after all of that's done is radioactive for.

So the amount of time that we have to store our nuclear waste.

The problems are cost and global politics, not fundamental technology.

Okay, here we go.

By the time I got to DC to talk to Johnny about this, I was obsessed.

Hello, good morning.

Welcome to our studio.

We have all this nuclear waste, right?

And it is scary, but imagine that there was a way that you could actually not just store it, but actually use it.

So you can use nuclear waste as fuel for more energy.

You can recycle nuclear waste.

100

Yes, and I typed all the way into this in a video

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that I'm now gonna promise is going to be on my channel by the time we air this one.

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This is that video.

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To understand what's going on here, you have to understand that nuclear waste isn't what you've been told.

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All right, let's zoom out for a sec.

105

Basically all of the electricity that you use, except solar, comes from spinning a turbine.

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It's magic.

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Most of the time inside a power plant, what you're really doing is you're heating up a liquid into steam and using that to spin the turbine.

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The most common way to do that is still burning stuff near it.

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That's fossil fuels.

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But you could also use liquid that the earth already heated up for you.

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That's geothermal.

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Or you can split atoms apart inside special rocks and make them really hot.

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That's nuclear.

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And the special hot rocks are uranium.

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Uranium.

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Uranium 235.

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Uranium sleep.

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Uranium fever.

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But only a really small part of natural uranium, less than one percent, is a kind of breakable uranium that can sustain a nuclear reaction.

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This is uranium 235.

121

That number refers to the number of neutrons in the atom.

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So typically uranium goes through a process called enrichment, which is making more of the uranium -235 out of the less useful uranium -238.

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By the time that's all done, your fuel looks like this.

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If you take your finger up to your first joint, that's about the size of a uranium fuel pellet.

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Those pellets then go into these long metal rods that I got to see while I was at Argonne.

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And then comes the nuclear reaction.

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So you fire a bunch of free atoms at your uranium -235, which cracks it into smaller, very unstable atoms, and throws off a couple other neutrons in the process,

128

which zoom off and hit more uranium nearby, and then more and more, a chain reaction of splitting atoms.

129

And each time they get split, a little mass turns into energy, which makes the rods really hot, which heats the water, which spins the turbine, which generates electricity.

130

Ta -da!

131

But eventually, after four to six years, you've broken enough of that special uranium that the reaction stops working efficiently.

132

And that spent fuel is now considered high -level nuclear waste.

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At this point, that waste is a mix of 238

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and a little bit of leftover 235 and a bunch of very unstable atoms that give off ionizing radiation.

135

That ionizing radiation, in large doses, is the bad stuff.

136

It's the scary, invisible killer that affects our tissues and our DNA in often deadly ways.

137

And the thing is, this nuclear waste stays radioactive for an insanely long time.

138

We're talking hundreds of thousands of years sometimes.

139

Which is, to put it mildly, a problem.

140

We've got to find better and safer ways to store nuclear waste.

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Waste that can remain radioactive for centuries?

142

That remains a big problem.

143

Right now, most nuclear waste in the United States is stored in dry casks that look like this, to protect people from the radioactive material inside.

144

Those dry casks are meant to last decades, but not hundreds of thousands of years, which is what we're talking about here.

145

So we've been having this ongoing fight for decades about what to do with nuclear waste.

146

There are options for long -term storage, and some countries are already doing that.

147

Johnny and I got into the details in his video.

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But right now, in the U .S and in lots of other countries, there are a lot of dry casks full of nuclear waste just sitting there at nuclear power plants.

149

So to summarize, we take uranium out of the ground, we use it once, and then we store it basically forever.

150

This is the once -through fuel cycle that the U .S has today.

151

Now listen to the analogy that they used in the 1960s to describe how stupid this fuel cycle would be.

152

Would you say that using the 235

153

and not the rest is sort of like using the cream and throwing away the milk?

154

Exactly.

155

The key is to figure out how to filter out the stuff that's still useful from the real waste that's not.

156

Turns out Argonne is one of the few places that is still testing nuclear waste recycling in the US, and I got to go see it.

157

I'm just gonna go right on up, and they're gonna tell me to stop filming right now.

158

It was a whole thing.

159

I had to send them my passport to prove that I was a US citizen before they'd let me on the tour, and I wasn't allowed to film inside.

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In order to go into this place that I can't show you, I have to wear these cool safety glasses.

161

How do I look?

162

Amazing.

163

Let's do it.

164

Luckily, Argon itself has actually published footage from the lab that I toured, so here's what they're doing inside that large protective box.

165

First, they cut up the nuclear waste into little pieces.

166

Then they dissolve those pieces into a vat of molten salts.

167

When they run electricity through that vat, it separates the uranium and other useful materials from the rest of the junk,

168

and pushes it across the vat where it creates deposits of the useful stuff on the other side.

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Then they make new fuel rods out of those deposits and stick them back in a reactor.

170

And it's not just possible to do that once, you can do it multiple times, not just making electricity but also reducing how long that waste is radioactive for, because you're using up the materials that last the longest.

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From hundreds of thousands of years down sometimes to hundreds of years.

172

which is a much easier timeframe to store something.

173

If you can pull this off, you can have a nuclear fuel cycle that looks like this.

174

You mine the uranium, you use it in a reactor, filter out the useful stuff, then you use it again and maybe again and again.

175

And when you can't anymore, then you put it in much shorter term storage that's much more manageable.

176

This is called a closed fuel cycle and there are lots of variations, but it's not hypothetical.

177

Some countries like Japan, for example, are already doing this.

178

And they say they do it because it reduces their dependence on imported fuel, it conserves uranium, and it reduces the radioactivity of their nuclear waste.

179

Which makes sense.

180

So, what happened in the United States?

181

Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you.

182

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced new policies meant to stop the growing risk of nuclear war.

183

And that meant stopping all nuclear recycling.

184

Why?

185

Well, you remember the materials that we separated out during the recycling process.

186

One of those materials was plutonium, which is a highly radioactive element that was seen as the highest concern for nuclear proliferation.

187

So President Jimmy Carter stopped all nuclear recycling, saying, quote, A viable and economic nuclear power program can be sustained without such reprocessing and recycling.

188

The U .S moved away from the kinds of reactors that could handle nuclear waste, called fast reactors, and toward the kinds of reactors that exist today, called light water reactors.

189

But while the U .S stopped nuclear recycling, other countries didn't.

190

The ban on nuclear recycling stopped being seen as helpful to slow the threat of nuclear proliferation.

191

So President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, but by then, companies had invested in the kinds of reactors that couldn't recycle, the kind that we have now.

192

Today, the main claim is that nuclear fuel recycling is too high cost, it's just not economical.

193

And that's true compared to using new uranium, which has been cheap and plentiful.

194

What incentive did anyone have to recycle their fuel?

195

But those incentives are changing.

196

The combination of wondering whether global conflict will cut off fuel supply, and the recognition that we need more clean energy in as many ways as possible,

197

as fast as possible, has started to wake people up through technology and a dream that we left behind.

198

We are not far off from it.

199

We're not talking about a technology that we're dreaming of, that we hope can work.

200

We're talking about a technology that has already been demonstrated before and proven.

201

We just need to commercialize it.

202

There is a lot to figure out and a long way to go but if we can recycle nuclear waste, I think it says something profound about what we as humans are capable of.

203

Splitting atoms, sure, but I mean something much more simple.

204

Changing our minds and overcoming our fears.

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To use our resources and our technology

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and our ingenuity to make other people's lives a little bit better tomorrow than they are today.

207

And this of course is just the beginning.

208

Not only will atomic power be released, but someday we will harness the rise and follow the tides and imprison the rays of the sun.

209

We have indeed just begun.

210

Huge If True is an optimistic show about using technology to make the world better.

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If that's something that you believe in, the best thing that you can do to support us is to subscribe.

212

And if you do subscribe, let me know.

213

I'd love to meet you in the comments.

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See you for the next one!

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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Deze video bevat 214 zinnen en 2641 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 13:03. De spreker praat snel, ongeveer 202 woorden per minuut, dus reken op verbonden en ingeslikte klanken. 85% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden; de rest kun je beter vooraf bekijken.

Belangrijke woorden in deze video

15 woorden uit de video die het leren waard zijn, met uitspraak en betekenis:

Woord	Uitspraak	Betekenis
uranium zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˌjuː.ˈɹeɪ.ni.əm/	uranium, uraan
reactor zelfstandig naamwoord	/ɹiˈæktɚ/	reactor
radioactive bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/ˌɹeɪdioʊˈæktɪv/	radioactief
atom zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈætəm/	atoom
atomic bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/əˈtɑː.mɪk/	atomair
spin werkwoord	/spɪn/	draaien
laboratory zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈlæb(ə)ɹəˌtɔɹi/	laboratorium, lab
turbine zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈtɜː.baɪn/	turbine
liquid zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈlɪk.wɪd/	vloeistof
scary bijvoeglijk naamwoord	/ˈskɛə.ɹi/	eng
filter zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˈfɪltɚ/	filter
radiation zelfstandig naamwoord	/ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/	straling
deposit zelfstandig naamwoord	/dɪˈpɑ.zɪt/	afzetting, neerzetting
subscribe werkwoord	/səbˈskɹaɪb/	abonneren
incentive zelfstandig naamwoord	/ɪnˈsɛntɪv/	drijfveer, aansporing

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

Woord	Betekenis
figure out werkwoord	uitvogelen, er achter komen
leave behind werkwoord	achterlaten
come up with werkwoord	bedenken, verzinnen
go down werkwoord	afdalen
pile up werkwoord	stapelen
throw away werkwoord	weggooien
turn out werkwoord	uitvallen, resulteren

Uitspraak om op te letten

De spreker gebruikt 46 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals I'm, we're, don't. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.

De “th”-klanken: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, hypothetical /ˌhaɪpəˈθɛtɪkəl/
De klanken “sh” en “zh”: radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/, proliferation /pɹəˌlɪf.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/, trash /tɹæʃ/, tissue /ˈtɪʃ.(j)u/
Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: uranium /ˌjuː.ˈɹeɪ.ni.əm/, electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, radioactive /ˌɹeɪdioʊˈæktɪv/, laboratory /ˈlæb(ə)ɹəˌtɔɹi/, radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/

Zo oefen je met deze video

Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als uranium, reactor, radioactive.

Grammatica in deze video

De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:

Structuur	In de video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — iets dat eerder begon en nog bezig is	have been doing · we've been having
Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet	being developed · was built · was born
Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog telt	we've already built · you've been told · you've broken
Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding	Oklo, which is · enrichment, which is · energy, which makes

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?

Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.

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Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Belangrijke woorden in deze video

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

Uitspraak om op te letten

Zo oefen je met deze video

Grammatica in deze video

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?