Almost everything in a retired American power plant comes back as scrap.<\/p>\n
Copper, structural steel, turbine casings, the entire switchyard<\/strong>.<\/p>\n One object never does.<\/p>\n Cutting the reactor vessel at an Oregon plant into shippable pieces would have meant forty separate truckloads<\/strong> and many hours of people working close to it.<\/p>\n So nobody cut it.<\/p>\n They filled it with concrete, wrapped it in plastic and set it afloat<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The vessel at the Trojan plant near Rainier, Oregon, is a welded steel can 42 feet long with walls between 4 and 8 inches thick. Most of the radioactivity was never in that shell. It sat in the stainless steel internals<\/strong>, the racks and baffles that spent seventeen years standing in the core.<\/p>\n Those internals were left exactly where they were.<\/p>\n Crews plated over every opening, pumped a light cellular concrete into every void inside<\/strong>, added shielding, then coated the package in acrylic latex and sealed it under heat shrink film so the weather could not touch it. The finished object weighed 1,020 tons and left the site as a single closed unit<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Recycling a reactor sounds responsible until you ask who pays for it, and the currency is dose. Segmenting the internals underwater, packaging the pieces and running the shipments would have put roughly four to five person rem onto the workforce.<\/p>\n Moving the whole thing cost about two tenths of one person rem.<\/p>\n That is the argument in full, and it is arithmetic rather than ideology. Washington regulators made the same point when they signed off on the plan, noting that the one piece route halved worker exposure at the plant, cut exposure at the receiving end to a twenty fifth of the alternative, and turned forty shipments into a single load<\/strong>.<\/p>\n John Erickson, who directed the radiation protection division at the Washington Department of Health, said the approval rested on the sealed unit holding<\/strong> for tens of thousands of years, by which point what is inside will have decayed to levels he described as safe. The steel was not spared because it was valuable. It was spared because handling it costs people<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The Columbia does not offer much of a window. River conditions allow a move of this size for roughly six weeks a year<\/strong>, beginning in August, which is why the schedule was built around the water.<\/p>\n The load travelled at five miles an hour.<\/p>\n That is slower than a jogger<\/strong>, and it stayed that slow for 270 miles upstream, past locks and orchards, to a port in Benton County, Washington. From there a heavy transporter carried it the last 30 miles overland.<\/p>\n The ground it crossed at the end has its own history. Hanford made plutonium for the American weapons program from the war onward, and the desert has been absorbing the leftovers of the atomic age ever since, which is why the trench exists<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The destination was a commercial low level waste site leased on the Hanford reservation. The trench measures 850 by 150 feet and runs 45 feet deep, and the vessel went in on a purpose built saddle<\/strong> rather than simply being dropped.<\/p>\n Then it was buried on 19 August.<\/p>\n More than 17 feet of soil and rock<\/strong> went over the top, a covering job that took three months. It was the first commercial<\/strong> reactor vessel in the United States to be moved and buried in one piece, and the approval notice<\/a> sets out the reasoning the state accepted.<\/p>\n There is something familiar in the shape of this. Big infrastructure is cheap to build and expensive to undo<\/strong>, which is the lesson the country relearns every time it takes down an urban viaduct<\/a>.<\/p>\n The rest of the plant went the normal way. Concrete came down, structural steel and copper went into the scrap trade<\/strong>, and the cooling tower, 499 feet of it, was brought down with explosives at seven in the morning. It was the first cooling tower at an American nuclear plant taken down that way.<\/p>\n By 2005 the site was released for unrestricted use.<\/p>\n You could put houses on it. The riverbank is a park, the lake is stocked<\/strong>, and people fish there without much thought for what used to stand behind them, the way they do at the old industrial edges<\/a> of many American towns.<\/p>\n One thing did not leave. Thirty four steel and concrete casks sit on a pad beside the Columbia, holding 791 spent fuel assemblies<\/strong> that came out of the pool in 2003 and have stayed since, because the federal repository that was promised never arrived. The state page<\/a> lists them.<\/p>\n So the plant was recycled almost completely, and the two parts that could not be are the two that matter. One lies under 17 feet of desert. The other is still on the riverbank<\/strong>, waiting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Almost everything in a retired American power plant comes back as scrap. Copper, structural steel, turbine casings, the entire switchyard. One object never does. Cutting the reactor vessel at an Oregon plant into shippable pieces would have meant forty separate truckloads and many hours of people working close to it. So nobody cut it. They filled it with … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":32006,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"vessel","rank_math_title":"","rank_math_description":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-earth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What was actually loaded onto the barge<\/h2>\n
Why nobody cut it into pieces<\/h2>\n
Two hundred and seventy miles at walking pace<\/h2>\n
The trench it went into<\/h2>\n
What did get recycled and what stayed behind<\/h2>\n