NiCE Club @ UC Berkeley

Meeting - 3 March 2025

Rohan's Presentation

Notes from the meeting:

• The meeting took place in Etcheverry 3106
• 14 people were in attendance
• conrad brought his bounty (signal generator and jigsaw) from the bins

Rohan giving his presentation

Additional Notes from the Meetings

This presentation is a semesterly NiCE club meeting tradition. Every semester Rohan gives this presentation and the club advertises this presentation to access a larger audience. Each time, Rohan updates the presentation and introduces new facts so even the veteran club members learn a few new things. During the presentation, Rohan invented a new unit of kWh/football field to describe the volume of waste produced versus the amount of energy that the waste generated.

Reference Links

• The presentation recording is here.

• All nuclear waste produced by reactors in the U.S. is stored on site at the reactor it was generated at.
• The U.S. government is tasked with finding a permanent repository to store the waste for thousands of year, but in the meantime, it is kept in dry cast storage.
• As seen in the above video, these casks are very durable and pose no threat to the surrounding environment
• While these casks may look large, all of the nuclear waste from the entire production history of nuclear energy in the U.S. could fit onto three football fields. This may sound like a lot of waste, but compared to the damage caused by waste from other energy sources such as unrecycleable materials (solar panels) to atmospheric CO2 (burning stuff), the volume of nuclear waste produced per kWh generated, is very small.