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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.
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.
Really, build some modern reactors there and run them from a remote central station. Also use it for storage, solar panels, etc...
The worst that could happen already has. May as well make some decent power for the effort.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Lemons turn YOU to lemonade
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
As someone who's worked in construction, I wouldn't go near this place as a construction worker. Construction firms have a very bad habit of not providing suitable masks, they tend to provide 'comfort' masks which have no protective value.
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I disagree: ***selling price*** of PV panels is coming down. However, the energy cost of creating solar panels isn't.
That makes no sense. The energy cost of the solar panels is part of the selling cost. The bulk of the materials for PV panels is silicon, and the major cost of production is getting the silicon to be extremely pure. Most of the other materials are common, like glass, aluminum and silver, and the rarer elements are only used in small quantities.
PV may work for many residential applications, but lacks both the energy density and constant load delivered that many industrial applications require.
The energy density can be fixed by deploying more solar panels. There's still plenty of room in most countries. The constant load can be solved by batteries and smart grids.
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.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
As opposed to the incumbent 18th century technology (coal / oil) which obliterates all coastal zones on the planet as a matter of normal operation.
No, nuclear power isn't perfect, but we don't have a generation technology that is. So pick a mix that does the least damage as a matter of normal operation, and keep working towards things that are better.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Solar panels do not need rare earths, they can be made without them, same goes for wind turbines.
"the energy cost of creating solar panels isn't" [falling]: Flat out wrong, see: Whatâ(TM)s the EROI of Solar? | Ramez Naam
Rare earths are sourced from China because they sell them cheap.
Declining solar panel performance is not an issue, good solar panels decline at less than 0.5% performance per year, that means they will still be going with 50% of their original efficiency 100 years from now.
Energy density is not a problem. See: Land Art Generator Initiative
A huge transition to solar panels will occur for one simple reason: price, solar+battery storage is expected to continue falling to as low as 2c per kWh of solar+battery.
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The best part about this plan, if they are careless with the nuclear waste and spill some- nobody will know as the whole area is contaminated. Combine cheap land with lax enforcement and you have a Russian dream business.
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
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The problem is 'his kind' aren't ignorant about how nuclear power works like you are, and they are fully aware that 'the worst nuclear disasters' to ever take place on the planet ... weren't really that bad.
Chernobyl isn't all that dangerous of a place to live unless you're inside the new containment building. You don't know people still work at the plant right? And that it was an operating power plant until well into the last decade, right?
Japan has had at least 3 major nuclear events in the last 100 years, 2 of those were atmospheric nuclear super criticality events resulting in nuclear detonation ... yet ... Those two cities are thriving. The third site, Fukushima is nothing more than a media sensationalization exercise where idiots like you freak out over ... nothing.
More people have been harmed by media coverage of nuclear events than the nuclear events themselves, thanks to idiots like you.
Get a fucking clue. Educate yourself. Do some research. That bullshit FUD they fed you in the 1950 isn't actually how it works.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Im going to venture capital a project to take geothermal energy from the earths core but just the bits that warm merkin land,
Warming merkin land is one of my favorite hobbies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Uh, you're aware many newer solar panels are made of lead,
You're aware that these are brand new, and already people are working on lead-free alternatives ? And manufacturing is as clean as you want it to be. The problem is China doesn't really want to be that clean (but that is changing too).
I'm pretty certain my toaster is not made out of an extremely toxic heavy metal.
No, but it probably has some of these metals inside, just like your phone. And people are more likely to throw a toaster in the garbage than big solar installations.
Sunny Hawaii and California, maybe, but up north in Washington or Oregon they'd only work during the Summer
Germany is even further up North, and they're breaking solar records every year. Add wind power, and combine low-loss grids to cover most of the needs, and work on storage, such as new types of liquid calcium batteries. Add smart grids, so you can use home batteries for storage.
Having actually lived in Germany and being half German, yes, we have a large amount of energy come from these. What you probably don't know is that this is only possible because we buy tons of energy from France and other neighbors to make up the loss (lots of that isn't renewabley generated), and ever since our brilliant chancellor decided to close our nuclear reactors, we've compensated by building more coal and natural gas plants to replace them. If anything, Germany should be an example of how not to do it, in my opinion.
And again, you kind of prove my point - they're deployed everywhere, but they don't work well during cloudy or rainy weather, which we get a lot of. They're deployed because the country has a well-meaning goal of being only sustained on renewable energy, and Solar + Wind are the only remotely reliable methods from the bunch for this region, not because they're good replacements. Nuclear energy only caused three incidents in close to 40 years of operation, of which only two released any contamination at all, and these were both extremely minor incidents with no effects on the environment or people. In comparison, over a 30 year period, coal power plants caused a very real amount of deaths or premature deaths; the number is around a million or so, maybe a little lower. If the country chooses coal to make up the difference, you are trading imaginary fears and monsters under the bed for very real dangers and deaths, and there's nothing that grinds my gears more than irrational and short sighted decisions. Something that, unfortunately, seems to be becoming increasingly common.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Depends upon how close you are and how strong the source is. There were cameras used to take pictures of the interior of Reactor Number 4's control room after the meltdown. They were so strong they had to use a mirror to get the images, and the cameras were nearly fried from it.
I suspect they're trying to make lemonade out of lemons.
The exclusion zone could probably be repopulated to some degree, but its never going to be popular. You'll get a lot more bang for your buck if you throw more waste there and have the added benefit that most people will shrug and say that it was already a death zone anyway, so why not?
Of course, most of it is not a death zone, certainly not after almost 30 years, but with the nuclear fears out there, you're more likely to see people erring on the side of fear, rather than on the side of being mad that someone has created a waste dump in an otherwise inhabitable place.
Having all that land sit there as nothing but a nature reserve is probably causing a country like Ukraine to get itchy. A pretty nature reserve that size is something that would be an extravagant luxury for their country. The fact that it was forced on them doesn't really change that. They could use the business, and if they're going to be handicapped by a fear of it being a death zone, they might as well use it as a death zone.