Do you compost? Rinse and separate your recycling? Yeah, getting rid of garbage is a pain. Unless your garbage is nuclear waste. Getting rid of that is apparently a production of epic proportions.
YouTuber Robert Fullone couldn’t help but notice this colossal convoy and posse of dudes in orange vests taking up both lanes of his street, so he was kind enough to give the internet a little tour of what he says is a nuclear waste disposal outfit working out of “West Valley,” which I assume is referring to West Valley Nuclear Services near Buffalo, New York.
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After nuclear fuel has spent years in a reactor generating heat which becomes electricity, it ends up being “spent” and no longer yields power but remains very hot and radioactive. At that point it gets put into a cask like the one in this video and eventually buried at a designated dumping facility somewhere around the country.
But before the radioactive material can be dumped at one of those green map dots, it has to make its way over the same roads everybody else uses to get around. And apparently it needs a pretty wide berth.
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I have never seen so many axles on a trailer. This thing looks like it could be a little cousin of NASA’s Crawler-Transporter, the glacial vehicle used to transport space shuttles on the ground.
The sticker on the side of that tank, besides the one that says “RADIOACTIVE,” puts the total weight of it at just under 300,000 pounds. For context, a typical big rig doesn’t weigh more than 80,000 pounds. Guess that’s why this truck and trailer have so many wheels. (More wheels basically means more load-bearing ability. That’s why dually pickup trucks exist.)
The Nuclear InformationResource Service regulates how this stuff can be transported. Theoretically you don’t have to worry if this truck pulls through your neighborhood, since the radioactive material is well shielded. But you might be stuck in traffic for a while.
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