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: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.