Area Around Chernobyl Plant To Become a Nuclear Dump (japantimes.co.jp)

mdsolar quotes a report from The Japan Times: A heavily contaminated area within a 10-kilometer radius of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine will be used to store nuclear waste materials, the chief of a state agency managing the wider exclusion zone said in an interview. "People cannot live in the land seriously contaminated for another 500 years, so we are planning to make it into an industrial complex," said Vitalii Petruk, the head of the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management. The zone is 30-km radius from the site of the 1986 nuclear accident -- the world's worst nuclear disaster. "We are thinking of making land that is less contaminated a buffer zone to protect a residential area from radioactive materials," he said. Petruk added, "We are considering building a facility for alternative energy such as solar panels" so as to utilize the remaining electricity infrastructure including power grids for the Chernobyl nuclear power plant there.

Comments

Re: Even if you think nuclear power doesnt kill pe

[MrKaos]

As opposed to coal which fucks up areas thousands of miles away with acid rain, carbon, strip mining and land destruction, and if you believe greenhouse gases which contributes to global warming!

Uranium mining is really bad as well. It uses acid leach mining which pollutes water tables. Mega litres of sulfuric acid pumped underground and stored above ground containing radio active isotopes. It's such a destructive form of mining it is illegal in Russia and The United States.

Switch to traditional uranium mining methods and that process creates massive amounts mine tailing that realease huge amount of highly water soluable radon gas that also pollutes water tables. Sure it's in peoples basements, that doesn't mean you should breate it or drink it.

Moving on to enrichment that process releases huge amount of CFC114 which is an extremely potent greenhouse gas. So you are looking at land destruction proportional to the amount of plants you are fueling. Both coal and nuclear are destructive to the land in different ways. Both are really bad options that come from a time when we didn't know as much.

Consider CdTe

[mdsolar]

Silicon solar cells degrade with time owing to cosmic ray damage. They experience more rapid degadation on orbit and the same will be true in the area around Chernobyl. It is possible that more amorphous CdTe cells would degrade more slowly owing to radiation, and in any case they are on a regimented recycling schedule owing to the cadmium content. So long as they don't them selves become low level waste through contamination, CdTe panels might be the way to go.

Re:conflicted

[Coren22]

There's no known working containment system as of today.

What? WHAT? Are you serious?

Currently in the US, we keep the spent rods in pools of water on site. This works pretty good, and keeps the radiation from getting out. Other places use a process called Vitrification which is encasing the material in glass, then the items are put into canisters and sealed up. This containment system works effectively and keeps the radiation and particles from escaping into the environment.

We have working containment, we don't have political will.