After It Is All Over (Decommissioning)

you nuclear reactors are very intense capital investments and their operating cost is relatively low and that means if you operate them over a long enough time they're extremely inexpensive source of electricity at the end though you do have a plant that maybes operated 4050 years and because neutrons make things radioactive the reactor vessel itself is radioactive if also in that category of low level waste the high level waste is always contained in the fuel and that fuel has been taken out but the reactor vessel because now perhaps it's weaker perhaps some things have broken needs to be decommissioned it has to be taken apart and treated as low-level waste basically buried someplace so what's the process by doing this well first you let the thing sit for a couple years and that makes a lot of sense because anything that was extremely radioactive meaning it has a short half-life will have decayed away into less radioactive or non radioactive material and then there's a time period where you can go through steps of securing it maybe eventually taking it all apart decommissioning it there's no real hurry the reactor plant isn't hurting anybody sitting there it's you can still walk around if these are low levels or radioactivity and then finally you could perhaps use the land again because again the land didn't become radioactive it's just you had a radioactive structure on it you had to remove well this process has actually happened in the u.s. at a number of locations and this means we understand the economic implication you can see that there's some acronyms here safe store is where they basically take the hottest things apart and it sits there decommission decon means it's totally gone and then there's even things where you basically are having it as a spent fuel facility where you put the spent fuel there you still have people working so watching it and guarding it but it's a great place to store the spent fuel until there's a more permanent repository the Shippingport reactor was the first commercial us reactor and it closed in 82 and it's been completely taken apart there's the Indian Point nuclear reactor again a large commercial reactor it ended its life in 72 and it's been fully decommissioned there's a large list that have and so the costs are well known and fortunately early on there was a law in Congress that said out of every kilowatt hour of electricity you sell you need to save a little bit of that profit something on the order of a tenth of one cent every sale that goes into a decommissioning fund so that at the end of your reactors life there is a pot of money there to be able to take it apart and the utilities have done that and they've done it quite well the costs today are about 300 to 400 million dollars to take apart a nuclear reactor and that money is there that money is monitored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make sure that there's going to be enough sometimes there's adjustments made in terms of the amount of particular utility has to charge their customers or maybe even decrease that amount because they want to make sure that this money is there and earmarked for only that purpose and the system has worked quite well in addition to just talking about it I have some personal experience in decommissioning you see at the University of Illinois we had a research reactor and this research reactor was the type made by GE called a trigger training research education general atomics reactor and it was started in 1960 and this is the trigger reactor at Illinois well 1960 was quite some time ago and the reactor had a wonderful very useful lifetime not just for research but also for education lots of Tours would go at the reactor I remember running a lab class there as to use the neutrons that were coming out the reactor is a fairly impressive building you've got people on it the reactor core is down below the central part in fact if you look down here you're looking into the water and the core is at the very bottom and the waters very good shielding so all of this took place but 1960 to about the year 2000 that's 40 years that was the reactor license the technology is 1960s technology maybe there's some things you could do but the decision was made to decommission and in this decision to decommission they actually had a deal back from the 1960s with the federal government that they would take the spent fuel and that's excellent because the spent fuel stuff inside those fuel rods is the high level waste so that's going now we have a reactor vessel inside those massive blue pieces of concrete that is radioactive and some of the concrete at least the stuff nearest by maybe slightly radioactive you got to take it apart so did certified work crew monitored everything else start going in and basically cut things apart you have people cutting off pipes right sawing off all the things that go into the building even the pieces of concrete how do you dismantle this well you saw it off and you cart piece by piece away and when you do this it eventually ends up in a truck and the truck will take it to a low-level waste repository when you get down a bit further and the concrete's very thick then you have to maybe take it apart in I in the form of rubble at least drilling out certain beam ports which you could take away and encase and this stuff eventually also all ends up bundled and put on a truck and taken away and buried so the decommissioning process took several years and now we have an empty building I think we should have left the empty building and we could use it for all sorts of good stuff but the decision was to Greenfield meaning taking the whole structure the whole building and turning it back into a greenfield this is the reactor building here on the left fairly good size building with a nice overhead crane and they needed to take it apart now since this building was built in the 1950s there was insulation of heating pipes and the like with asbestos now asbestos of course is just fine if it's all enclosed but if you breathe it you can get a very serious lung disease and lung ailment so if you're going to take down the building you have to perfectly put it into a plastic bag this is somewhat so this asbestos dust doesn't get places I had the plastic bag around it took out all the stuff inside you're left with the steel superstructure and you actually took the steel superstructure down right and ended up with a hole in the ground and now it is simply grass right there no record we even had a nuclear reactor on canvas decommissioning works it's being paid for every watt you buy and it's a relatively straightforward system that's what you need to know you [Music] you

Channel: Illinois EnergyProf

Views: 58,711

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Id: XDHCpZKiECM

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019