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

From the 'making a virtue of necessity' department

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This isn't exactly a feel-good story; but it's hard to say that it's a bad plan. If you've already got a serious 'brownfield' site, using it to deal with other unpleasant industrial matters rather than letting it sit idle or attempting some wildly uneconomic remediation seems sensible. Hopefully the new facilities will not inherit the legacy of...competent and safety oriented...nuclear engineering that caused the trouble originally.

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, along with the generally low tolerance of radiation risks for civilians not working in nuclear energy/related industries; but are there any areas(outside of the interior and immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl sarcophagus) where the radiation exposure you would receive just by standing around is still intense enough to be an occupational safety issue?

Isotope contamination can mostly be dealt with as though it were a mere chemical hazard, since you won't take much exposure unless you ingest/inhale/whatever the stuff and end up with it in your body somewhere; but your options are a lot more limited if you are being bathed in ionizing radiation just standing there. Chemical protective gear isn't a pleasure to wear; but it's doable. Radiation shielding tends to be mass prohibitive unless you are going full power armor or something.

Re: Even if you think nuclear power doesnt kill pe

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Some environmentalists are so stupid! Clearly we are not going to stop using energy and I'd say nuclear is a far cleaner option than coal/oil

So until solar is at a point where it can support millions of homes, nuclear is our best option.

People keep forgetting the 7/10 rule. . .

[Salgak1]

Simply, there's a sevenfold decrease in radiation over every tenfold increase in time. A basic rule-of-thumb for estimating radioactive decay and dose rates. Yes, there are still radiation hell areas around the Chernobyl reactor core, but the place was designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium. But typical dose rates in the area are well under a millisievert per hour. While several thousand times higher than the average dose received by the average resident of the planet, it's still well below the dose required to cause even mild radiation sickness. There is, of course, an increased cancer risk, but the increase is also small, if measureable.

So the question becomes: what's the better risk: let it self-decontaminate via decay, or dump waste there. And if so, how will it be stored ? Surface Storage of hazardous waste materials, be they radioactive or chemically active/poisonous (or, like plutonium, both. . .) is FAR less than optimal. Ideally, storage of waste should be in engineered long-duration containers stored out of the weather in a geologically stable area, well insulated from both the atmosphere and the local water table.

Re:People keep forgetting the 7/10 rule. . .

[hankwang]

But typical dose rates in the area are well under a millisievert per hour. While several thousand times higher than the average dose received by the average resident of the planet, it's still well below the dose required to cause even mild radiation sickness

You're mixing dose rates (Sv/h) and doses (Sv) in your argument, so I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here. Some googling tells me that the dose rates around Chernobyl are typically 1 micro-Sv/h (indeed, well below 1 mSv/h), or 8 mSv per year, which is only a factor 3 higher than the global average human exposure. I think those numbers sound nicer than they really are, since the Chernobyl dose rates are for people just being present and breathing air, but not actually ingesting contaminated water and food or inhaling dust.

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

[Salgak1]

I disagree: ***selling price*** of PV panels is coming down. However, the energy cost of creating solar panels isn't. The rare earths are, not surprisingly, rare, and both mining and refining them have not changed much. So the breakeven point is not QUITE as good as it sounds, it's just that labor in China costs less than it does elsewhere. And that is changing as well.

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. 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.

I suspect that "transition" will not fully occur. PV may work for many residential applications, but lacks both the energy density and constant load delivered that many industrial applications require.

Re: Even if you think nuclear power doesnt kill pe

[EmeraldBot]

Some environmentalists are so stupid! ... nuclear is our best option.

Yep, if your kind were in charge we'd have nuke plants everywhere and if some accident happened making 90% of the earth uninhabitable, we could send your kind to Mars or the moon.

Ahem. Given that water comprises 70% of our earth, and water is extremely good at defusing and containing radiation, the chance of 90% of our planet becoming uninhabitable is quiet unlikely, to say the least. Furthermore, the grandparent has a really valid point - solar cells contain toxic heavy metals that aren't commonly recycled, coal releases far more radiation and the explosion from one is actually a lot more destructive than an explosion at a nuclear power plant, hydroelectric dams murder the wildlife in the water and drown out everything if they collapse, and windmills kill birds and disrupt the surrounding landscape. Geothermal is as ideal as it gets, but it's currently limited to only a few places in the world.

Nuclear is the only form of energy that can deal with our need for electricity. It can produce vast amounts of electricity, far more so than any competing technology. It has very low impact on the surrounding area except for the very few times it was disrupted; and in all these cases, it was either careless errors and old reactors, or it was major environmental disasters. We've used it for decades successfully, and if only people would make the rational choice, we'd eliminate even the few cases where they have failed. Take a look at a molten salt reactor. Molten salt fixes the few safety problems in light water reactors, while also creating waste that only take a few hundred years to degrade harmlessly. They can even process existing waste from other power plants!

There are many steps we can take; a solar panel on houses in sunnier climates isn't a bad idea, so long as we're careful to make sure they're properly recycled, but most renewable sources do incredible amounts of damage to the environment they're supposed to protect. I think fish fear the turbines of a dam far more than 1/10000 of the radiation from a banana. If we really want to make a long term investment in our future, then I think nuclear is our only practical option.

Re:conflicted

[MachineShedFred]

No, all we need is the senior Senator from the Great State of Nevada to go write his book and get out of the Senate. And a good dash of physics and common sense. We have a $90B facility already constructed and ready to go - it may not be suitable for millions of years of storage, but it's quite suitable for several hundred years of the really high-level stuff if we separate it through fuel reprocessing and vitrify it.

Funny how Harry Reid didn't have any problem with Yucca Mountain while it was in planning and construction, and then threw himself on the tracks when it came to actually using the place.

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

[Ol Olsoc]

Yep. Decades from now, when you're having to deal with the decommissioning problems of your nuclear plant... A far greater problem.

Well played. Kind of an argument stopper in fact.

Since panels are always improving, a plant based on microinverters (which are desirable anyway as they reduce transmission loss)

And less strategically vulnerable as well. Imagine the strategic advantages of that - I guess the best non military example of that is when we have a local power failure, and my house is still lit up, furnace working, while the neighbors shiver in the dark - disclaimer, my neighbors are all welcome to come over and enjoy a blackout party. We have plenty of beer and wine as well.

But I digress

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.

This! For some odd reason, solar skeptics often post about how EV panels will just kinda fall apart right after the warranty period. I've got some old-school cells that are still going strong.

And the doubters care free to doubt, but the panels keep going up. Yesterday I had my motorcycle out for an early spring ride, and saw an old Victorian mansion with the roof covered in panels. It was, oddly enough, awesome.

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

[hey!]

but are there any areas(outside of the interior and immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl sarcophagus) where the radiation exposure you would receive just by standing around is still intense enough to be an occupational safety issue?

Well, "enough to be an occupational safety issue" is not very much. You don't have to get enough radiation to get acutely sick for it to be an "issue". Still it's reasonably safe to work in the exclusion zone as long as you take precautions and monitor your exposure. In fact people do continue work there, even at the plant itself. It's a little-known fact that the three other Chernobyl reactors were operated 14 years after the 1986 catastrophe in Number 4, but in part this reflects a much more cavalier attitude towards worker safety than would be acceptable in the West. It's also little-known that the 1986 catastrophe was neither the first nor the last serious mishap at the plant. And then of course when you shut down a nuclear reactor you can't just walk away from it even in the best of circumstances. As of today people are still working in the exclusion zone to maintain the site and build the New Safe Confinement structure.

I have mixed feelings about the idea of using Chernobyl as a nuclear waste site. On one hand it makes sense to concentrate your nuclear hazard operations where you're forced to do it anyway. On the other hand it'd be a bad thing to simply abandon the area, because it's not really that contaminated -- not so contaminated that people can't work there at least. And people will have to continue working there. For how long? Possibly for as along as our species continues to exist, because whenever the decision comes up whether to stabilize the site permanently or build another confinement structure that'll last for a few more decades, it'll always be more cost effective to go with the temporary fix. So it's a very good thing that people will be able to move into the exclusion zone in 500 years -- if we don't mess up in the meantime.

What you really need is a crystal ball that can show you the future. If you see a well-managed operation then this is a site which is solving problems for the rest of the world. If you see a half-assed operation then this may become site where the problems are so concentrated you can't work on them there. Everything boils down to how much you trust people to do the right thing even when it's expensive and difficult and doing the wrong thing won't cause any problems unless you're unlucky.