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Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other n
by S201 4y ago
Is that not only an issue when a plant is permanently decommissioned? That seems like a fairly easy problem to solve as well: Bury it like you would any other nuclear waste that can't be reprocessed; or melt the steel down and use it in a new reactor.
- mjevans 4y agoNot an expert; but offhand I recall that irradiated materials, in addition to being harmful to biological entities like humans, are also changed by the absorbed radiation. Effectively they gain impurities from it. The best course of action would be to let the halflifes decay and then return it to the raw material stream.
- Ygg2 4y agoThe halflife of irradiated equipment isn't that long (it's what you call low level waste), you just bury it and wait till it becomes less radioactive.
- Symbiote 4y agoYou can't just announce the problem is "easy to solve". The other article on the front page is about the decommissioning of Sellafield, predicted to take over a century. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997375
- GekkePrutser 4y agoelting it down doesn't make it less radioactive. It's still a significant health hazard to work with, making new construction with the remolded materials prohibitively expensive.