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:From the 'making a virtue of necessity' departm

[drinkypoo]

Hopefully the new facilities will not inherit the legacy of...competent and safety oriented...nuclear engineering that caused the trouble originally.

And not just originally. Remember when the first containment building was falling apart and dropping big chunks of concrete that were raising clouds of radioactive dust, and they had to build another one over the top of it? Yeah. They've already got a history of mismanaging the site. Now we're supposed to believe that they're going to do it right in the future? Nofuckingway.

One thing I'd be curious about, though: I assume that the exclusion zone is because of a combination of nasty isotopes in the soil that make subsistence activities, kids eating dirt, and various other aspects of human habitation problematic,

No, just walking around, just the wind blowing... you don't have do actually do much.

I think the truly telling thing here is that when Nuclear fails, the only thing you can follow it with is Solar. Why not just put in Solar to begin with, and skip the exclusion zone stage?

Re:From the 'making a virtue of necessity' departm

[drinkypoo]

I disagree: ***selling price*** of PV panels is coming down. However, the energy cost of creating solar panels isn't.

What? Who told you that? It most certainly is. For example, we can make thin-film ones now, they don't all have to be PC. Their energy cost continues to decline.

As a longer-term issue, is the declining performance of PV panels over time. This, too, is slowly being overcome, but in the long term, will require PV panels to be recycled and re-manufactured as they drop below viable generation levels.

Yep. Decades from now, when you're having to deal with the decommissioning problems of your nuclear plant... A far greater problem. As well, as we move to microinverters, the cost of upgrading your power plant drops rapidly. Since panels are always improving, a plant based on microinverters (which are desirable anyway as they reduce transmission loss) can either be built to improve over time (by installing heavier-gauge cable than you need initially, to account for improving output of panels in the same form factor) or to become smaller over time, and simply replace the panels with less panels as the efficiency improves. The cost of this maintenance actually decreases as time passes.

There isn't much data at all on these costs, simply because the vast majority of installed PV panels have yet to reach that state.

You don't need the vast majority to do that. You can extrapolate from the ones that have. As it is, no solar panels commonly deployed will produce less than 80% of their power after 25 years. Even in the 1970s solar panels would pay back the energy cost of their production in seven years, and that's the old PC kind. The TF ones can do it in two or three.