Decontamination is basically a fancy word for scrubbing. Whether we pressure-wash reactor walls, scabble floors to dust, use “electrochemical decontamination,” or just send in remote-controlled concrete-shaving robots, it all basically boils down to what you do to your bathtub: apply chemical, thermal, and/or mechanical energy to a surface, and scour it clean. We end up producing a mixture of secondary wastes, piles of radioactive concrete dust or liquids laced with dangerous isotopes. As with primary nuclear waste, these secondary wastes require disposal, though we produce them in tiny quantities, relative to other generator wastes, such as coal slurry.
Though the world has now seen a few dozen high-profile nuclear decommissioning projects, in virtually every case we still fly at least somewhat by the seat of our pants. The principles are easy enough to grasp: get rid of dangerous material (decontamination) then carefully bulldoze the place (deconstruction) and test the area to make sure it’s safe for later use. The problem is that virtually every nuclear reactor has its own quirks, either in its design or its placement or its history. The Fukushima Daiichi decommissioning project recently put out a call for help on various issues, asking for pitches and quotes on everything from high-altitude decontamination to getting workers safely into the most contaminated areas.
With great power comes great responsibility
Switching on a nuclear power plant is a big decision, fraught with risk from the planning stages until decades after the last day of operation. Often, investors are signing up for sixty years or more, long and difficult battles with multiple groups who don’t necessarily all want the same things. The public’s primary concern seems to be proximity of reactors to towns and cities, while the government’s is undoubtedly reactor security and safety procedures. After several public referendums and a maintenance schedule that was designed to be barely, if at all, achievable, the Maine Yankee reactor shut down voluntarily, shelling out $500 million or so to avoid the costs of not going out of business.
With little reliable nuclear investment on the near horizon, we seem to be headed for an increasingly non-nuclear future. It’s almost a certainty already, as the majority of existing reactors creep closer to the shutdown age, and we approach the point past which we won’t have time to get alternatives up and running to replace them. At that point, we truly will have no choice but to turn to coal, natural gas, and other carbon-emitting generator technologies to make up for the losses in capacity. Many of these reactors have serviced America for close to 40 years, pumping a fifth of the country’s electricity without a single major domestic incident, and as they retire they will be fearfully replaced with technologies that continue to kill, today.
Decades of legislative pressure and public misinformation have pushed us to this point. The slow and laborious process of decommissioning is projected to cost upwards of $40 billion over the course of the next thirty years or so, and those costs will have psychological impacts on both energy corporations and the public — a public which will (I’m calling it now) end up footing some substantial portion of the bill. It wouldn’t be such an immediate, looming problem if we’d been building and replacing our reactors as we ought to have been doing for the past thirty years, updating the technology for both safety and efficiency and planning ahead for looming energy shortfalls. We did neither, however, and will undoubtedly blame the costs of that inaction on the technology itself, rather than on our non-starter approach to it.
If nothing is done to prepare for the coming wave of nuclear retirements, we will have to return essentially our entire energy sector to old, profoundly polluting technologies. The only other option would be to let these plants continue past their expiration dates. Neither option is acceptable, neither safe, and both are very easily avoidable. Investment in nuclear needs to happen now, not to undo our already egregious reliance on fossil fuels but simply to maintain that egregious situation, to keep it from becoming far worse. That might not be the sexiest imperative, but it’s a vitally important one nonetheless.
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