Shadowing Practice: The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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nuclear power nuclear power nuclear power nuclear waste nuclear waste nuclear waste
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okay i need to show you something this is a nuclear
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reactor built in 1962 the atomic power plant of the future being developed by argon national laboratory
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but it's not just any old nuclear reactor this reactor is different in many ways from the nuclear power plants
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that supply some of our homes today with electricity the biggest difference was the fuel they used to make electricity.
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This nuclear reactor made electricity out of nuclear waste.
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Nuclear waste.
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Nuclear waste.
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Some kind of nuclear waste.
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Well sir, where should we dump this batch?
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When I think of nuclear waste, I think of that classic glowing green goo in yellow barrels, you know?
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This radioactive stuff that we end up with after all of the fuel is used up
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that we have to store for hundreds of thousands of years because it's so dangerous.
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Like, we fight about nuclear waste all the time.
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We say, can we even use nuclear
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because we end up with this radioactive waste
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and where should we store it and not near my house
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and you're telling me that there's a nuclear reactor
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that can make electricity out of nuclear waste and it was built in the 1960s?
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Back then they were predicting that we would use this technology to build this incredible clean energy future.
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By the year 2000 more than half the electric power of the country will come from atomic sources.
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But today we're nowhere close to that.
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We don't reuse any of our nuclear waste, instead it just piles up.
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But if this technology works that means
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that our nuclear waste isn't radioactive trash it's an incredible clean energy resource
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and it's just sitting there sucking up money to keep it safe we think about technology as constantly moving forward
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but this is a story about how we left behind a technology
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that could change our energy future
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so this video is about what happened to using nuclear waste to make electricity to the clean energy future
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that we could have had but more importantly this video is about the people trying to bring that future back.
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Nuclear waste.
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Nuclear waste problem.
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The concern about nuclear energy.
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There are concerns about emissions.
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Abundant power.
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We need clean energy.
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Energizes the city.
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We are coming up with new nuclear reactors
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that will guarantee a plentiful supply of atomic power for the nation and the world for centuries to come.
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I first got obsessed with this topic
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because a couple of weeks ago my friend
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and fellow video journalist johnny harris called me up
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and he asked me for some help on a video
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that he was making all about nuclear power let's do this
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i'm going to go down the rabbit hole on why people are afraid of nuclear energy what are the events
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and the things that freak us all out and i kind of want you to do the opposite
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to look at like is there a future for this technology
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and should we actually be as afraid as we are
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so i started to dig into it
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and as part of my research process into nuclear power i got invited to go visit one of the largest
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and oldest national research centers in the United States.
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Here we are.
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This is Argonne National Laboratory.
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We're going to get to go see the research that they're doing.
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And they have been doing research on nuclear power since like before I was born.
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Hold on.
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Do you recognize that name?
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Argonne National Laboratory.
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Yeah.
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This is the same national lab that developed that incredible old nuclear waste recycling reactor.
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But I didn't know that yet.
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So we go on this incredible tour.
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It's awesome.
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I'm learning a ton.
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I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm going to be so over prepared to talk to Johnny about nuclear power.
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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.
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And at the end of the tour, I'm sitting with them under this big tree.
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And one of them says something that just short circuits my brain.
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So we're actually working with Argonne closely on how to recycle existing nuclear waste in the U .S.
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There is enough used fuel to power the country for the next 150 years.
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Wait, I'm sorry, what?
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There is enough used fuel in the country, in the US alone, to generate power for the country for the next 150 years.
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There's enough used fuel, meaning nuclear waste, in the US to power the country for 150 years.
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Like you can see me not believing her.
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I think it's some fake math.
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Like maybe technically there's enough energy there, but like we could never really use it.
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We don't know how to do that.
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Whereas like when they say, you know, geothermal, you can power the earth for like thousands of years
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if we could get all of the energy out of the
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earth it's like yeah we can't we don't know how to do
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that do we know how to yeah we just don't have the facility commercial facility to do
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so but the technology is there experts differ on the exact number of years here
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but they agree
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that the nuclear waste we have now could be used as a large energy source based on technology
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that we've already built but it gets even better if you reuse
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that nuclear waste especially
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if you reuse it more than once you can dramatically cut down on the amount of time
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that the waste after all of that's done is radioactive for.
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So the amount of time that we have to store our nuclear waste.
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The problems are cost and global politics, not fundamental technology.
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Okay, here we go.
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By the time I got to DC to talk to Johnny about this, I was obsessed.
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Hello, good morning.
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Welcome to our studio.
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We have all this nuclear waste, right?
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And it is scary, but imagine that there was a way that you could actually not just store it, but actually use it.
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So you can use nuclear waste as fuel for more energy.
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You can recycle nuclear waste.
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You can recycle nuclear waste.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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which zoom off and hit more uranium nearby, and then more and more, a chain reaction of splitting atoms.
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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.
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Ta -da!
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But eventually, after four to six years, you've broken enough of that special uranium that the reaction stops working efficiently.
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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.
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That ionizing radiation, in large doses, is the bad stuff.
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It's the scary, invisible killer that affects our tissues and our DNA in often deadly ways.
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And the thing is, this nuclear waste stays radioactive for an insanely long time.
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We're talking hundreds of thousands of years sometimes.
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Which is, to put it mildly, a problem.
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We've got to find better and safer ways to store nuclear waste.
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Waste that can remain radioactive for centuries?
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That remains a big problem.
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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.
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Those dry casks are meant to last decades, but not hundreds of thousands of years, which is what we're talking about here.
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So we've been having this ongoing fight for decades about what to do with nuclear waste.
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There are options for long -term storage, and some countries are already doing that.
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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.
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So to summarize, we take uranium out of the ground, we use it once, and then we store it basically forever.
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This is the once -through fuel cycle that the U .S has today.
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Now listen to the analogy that they used in the 1960s to describe how stupid this fuel cycle would be.
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Would you say that using the 235
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and not the rest is sort of like using the cream and throwing away the milk?
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Exactly.
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The key is to figure out how to filter out the stuff that's still useful from the real waste that's not.
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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.
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I'm just gonna go right on up, and they're gonna tell me to stop filming right now.
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It was a whole thing.
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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.
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How do I look?
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Amazing.
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Let's do it.
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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.
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First, they cut up the nuclear waste into little pieces.
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Then they dissolve those pieces into a vat of molten salts.
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When they run electricity through that vat, it separates the uranium and other useful materials from the rest of the junk,
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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.
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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.
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which is a much easier timeframe to store something.
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If you can pull this off, you can have a nuclear fuel cycle that looks like this.
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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.
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And when you can't anymore, then you put it in much shorter term storage that's much more manageable.
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This is called a closed fuel cycle and there are lots of variations, but it's not hypothetical.
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Some countries like Japan, for example, are already doing this.
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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.
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Which makes sense.
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So, what happened in the United States?
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Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you.
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In 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced new policies meant to stop the growing risk of nuclear war.
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And that meant stopping all nuclear recycling.
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Why?
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Well, you remember the materials that we separated out during the recycling process.
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One of those materials was plutonium, which is a highly radioactive element that was seen as the highest concern for nuclear proliferation.
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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.
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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.
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But while the U .S stopped nuclear recycling, other countries didn't.
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The ban on nuclear recycling stopped being seen as helpful to slow the threat of nuclear proliferation.
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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.
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Today, the main claim is that nuclear fuel recycling is too high cost, it's just not economical.
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And that's true compared to using new uranium, which has been cheap and plentiful.
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What incentive did anyone have to recycle their fuel?
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But those incentives are changing.
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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,
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as fast as possible, has started to wake people up through technology and a dream that we left behind.
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We are not far off from it.
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We're not talking about a technology that we're dreaming of, that we hope can work.
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We're talking about a technology that has already been demonstrated before and proven.
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We just need to commercialize it.
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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.
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Splitting atoms, sure, but I mean something much more simple.
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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.
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And this of course is just the beginning.
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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.
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We have indeed just begun.
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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.
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And if you do subscribe, let me know.
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I'd love to meet you in the comments.
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See you for the next one!
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 214 sentences and 2641 words to shadow. The speech runs for 13:03. The speaker talks fast, about 202 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| uranium noun | /ˌjuː.ˈɹeɪ.ni.əm/ | The element with atomic number 92 and symbol U. A radioactive silvery-grey metal in the actinide series. |
| reactor noun | /ɹiˈæktɚ/ | A person who responds to a suggestion, stimulation or other influence. |
| electricity noun | /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/ | Originally, a property of amber and certain other nonconducting substances to attract lightweight material when rubbed, or the cause of this property; now… |
| radioactive adjective | /ˌɹeɪdioʊˈæktɪv/ | Exhibiting radioactivity. |
| atom noun | /ˈætəm/ | The smallest possible amount of matter which still retains its identity as a chemical element, now known to consist of a nucleus surrounded by electrons. |
| atomic adjective | /əˈtɑː.mɪk/ | Of or relating to atoms; composed of atoms; monatomic. |
| spin verb | /spɪn/ | To rotate, revolve, gyrate (usually quickly); to partially or completely rotate to face another direction. |
| laboratory noun | /ˈlæb(ə)ɹəˌtɔɹi/ | A room, building or institution equipped for scientific research, experimentation or analysis. |
| turbine noun | /ˈtɜː.baɪn/ | Any of various rotary machines that use the kinetic energy of a continuous stream of fluid (a liquid or a gas) to turn a shaft. |
| liquid noun | /ˈlɪk.wɪd/ | A substance that is flowing, and keeping no shape, such as water; a substance of which the molecules, while not tending to separate from one another like those… |
| scary adjective | /ˈskɛə.ɹi/ | Causing fear or anxiety |
| filter noun | /ˈfɪltɚ/ | A device which separates a suspended, dissolved, or particulate matter from a fluid, solution, or other substance; any device that separates one substance from… |
| radiation noun | /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/ | The shooting forth of anything from a point or surface, like diverging rays of light. |
| deposit noun | /dɪˈpɑ.zɪt/ | Sediment or rock that is not native to its present location or is different from the surrounding material. Sometimes refers to ore or gems. |
| generate verb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ə.ɹeɪt/ | To bring into being; give rise to. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| leave behind verb | To abandon. | |
| use up verb | To consume, deplete, expend, or exhaust. | |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. | |
| cut off verb | /ˌkʌt ˈɔf/ [ˌkɐɾ ˈɔf] | To remove by cutting. |
| cut up verb | To cut upward. | |
| give off verb | /ɡɪv ɒf/ | To emit; to produce and send forth; to come across in some manner. |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 46 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, we're, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, hypothetical /ˌhaɪpəˈθɛtɪkəl/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/, proliferation /pɹəˌlɪf.əˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, recognition /ˌɹɛkəɡˈnɪʃ(ə)n/, trash /tɹæʃ/, tissue /ˈtɪʃ.(j)u/
- Long words — get the stress right: uranium /ˌjuː.ˈɹeɪ.ni.əm/, electricity /ɪˌlɛkˈtɹɪsɪti/, radioactive /ˌɹeɪdioʊˈæktɪv/, laboratory /ˈlæb(ə)ɹəˌtɔɹi/, radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like uranium, reactor, electricity.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | have been doing · we've been having |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being developed · was built · was born |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | we've already built · you've been told · you've broken |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | Oklo, which is · enrichment, which is · energy, which makes |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.