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Decommissioning San Onofre Nuclear Plant May Take Decades
gkndivebum writes "Southern California Edison has elected to decommission the San Onofre nuclear plant after a failed effort to upgrade the steam generation system. 'Nuclear economics' is the reason stated for the proposed decommissioning. Other utilities operating nuclear power plants in the US likely face similar decisions when it comes to weighing the costs of upgrading older facilities. Allowing the reactors to remain in 'safe storage' for a period of up to 60 years will allow for radioactive decay and lower radiation exposure for the workers performing the demolition."
Settle the fuck down. The fuel is removed, and everything that remains on site would not be classified as high level waste. There is no significant safety issue here and accident could cause a large scale release of radioactive material since the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of radioactive material is the fuel itself (and we are talking several orders of magnitude here). Decommissioning a nuclear plant is not that much more complicated than dealing with other types of non-radioactive hazardous waste. Here is a surprise for you: when a reactor is defueled, the containment is often left open to the outside environment (yes, the containment doors are open and you can look in). This is when a lot of work occurs at nuclear reactors since they don't have to worry about nuclear safety requirements or protecting the public from a radioactive release.
It's nice to see another monument to short-sightedness being dismantled. The atomic era of investing heavily in a technology that burdens human beings with the most poisonous substances on earth for literally thousands of years needs to be put to rest and this is how we do it. Decades of hearing pro-nuclear people hem and haw about what will be done with nuclear waste is enough. Decades of continuous safety violations by the companies that run nuclear power plants is enough. The promise of truly safe nuclear power will never be delivered upon due to human greed and incompetence.