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: They tormented him until he had a horrifying

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... -(SCREAMS)

NARRATOR: ...we can't show it to you now.

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: There are more than 71,000 tons of nuclear waste

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: Even microscopic amounts of plutonium,

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: Almost half a century

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: They loaded the, uh,

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 Jersey Shore was the title of a lighthearted

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: Unfortunately,

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: So that's probably not a great idea.

-(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: There are radioactive alligators on the site.

(STUDIO AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

MAN: Radioactive materials are in the sediments.

-(ALLIGATOR HISSING) -(CLANGING)

MAN: It's gonna go up the food chain and...

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: I got on Facebook in order to reconnect

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: The most contaminated place in the entire

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: Mistakes during construction are factors

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,