As with all our nuclear waste no-one has a clue what to do with them when obsolete/redundant.
Similar situation at Rosyth.
Every nuclear submarine we ever built lies rotting. Similar situation in other countries too. Esp. USSR/Russia.
Anybody live near these places?
Well take the reactor out, refurbish it using a robot, and cart it to just near the bottom of your garden. Unlimited power for ever, as long as you have a good supply of water of course.
Brian
Because it is actually the most sensible strategy.
Harry has been told any times that leaving nuclear waste to decay under controlled conditions is the simplest policy and is perfectly safe. He just refuses to believe it.
Exactly. The nuclear material is contained in shielding designed to - contain nuclear radiatiion!
Why bother to take it out whilst the activity is high?
No point. Leave it for 60 years and then walk in and dismantle with no special protection.
Its well known that the cheapest way to decomission is to strip all the fuel and outer stuff from a reactor leaving just the building and the reactor itself, and then mothball it for 60 years, then dismantle it.
Tell harry thay haven't decomissioned dartmoor either!
Its a lot more radioactive than any mothballed reactor.
No, he chooses to misrepresent it as a failure to address the issue, because harry is a stupid green, and has pinned his life savings and his ego to solar panels and renewable energy.
And he is not te sort of person to admit he has been made a fool of.
Obviously the waste is going to decay, the storage issue is safeguarding of the waste against access, and the environment against pollution.
Most of these submarines were taken out of service because the reactor was at the end of it's useful life. So how are you going to control the decay of something with a half life of hundreds of thousands of years?
Yeah, and so what.
Anything with a half-life that long is not particularly dangerous.
Dunno mate. We could ecxavate all of dartmoor and bury it down a coal mine I guess.
Dartmoor is more radioactive than the Fukushima exclusion zone! How can you say that!
How many times do you have to be told you can't have something that is highly radioactive and a long halflife. It is impossible!
We know you are thick but that doesn't make it true.
Drivel. Where do you suppose radon comes from?
From the slow natural radioactive decay of uranium and thorium, which themselves are weakly radioactive as their isotopes have long half-lives. Such decay produces alpha particles which can be stopped by a sheet of paper, making the two metals quite safe to handle.
There is a small amount of uranium in some rocks. Because the amount is small, and the half lives are long, the amounts of decay products are very small. So even though those decay products, some of them, have short half lives and are therefore more radioactive, there is very little of them.
In the chain:
uranium -> thorium -> radium -> radon -> lead (eventually)
the one to worry about is radon because it's a gas and if you get some of it in your lungs there is more scope for radiation damage than for the others (unless you have a habit of grinding rocks up into dust and eating the dust).
But I suspect you'd have to live in a granite cave for it actually to matter.
As TNP says, they haven't decommissioned Dartmoor yet. So what d'ye propose to do about *that*?
From the very slow delay of uranium in millions of tons of rock.
Did you know that you are more radioactive than Dartmoor and its radon gas? You have several thousand decay events in your body every second. And its all long half life stuff too. There is carbon 14 decay with a half life of about 5,700 years and potassium 41(IIRC) with a half life of a few hundred thousand years.
These are both natural to.
So now you kno0w you are highly radioactive where do you want to be burried to keep the rest of us safe.
Not that I worry about it the internal exposure is only about 400 times the exposure you get from external sources like bomb testing, flying in aeroplanes, etc.
harry is more radioactive than Dartmoor and they haven't decommissioned him yet so there is no chance they will do Dartmoor first.
The risks associated with radon are greatly exaggerated. This, from
"A large portion of the general population is under the misconception that the frequently published risks associated with radon are well accepted scientific facts. In reality, the vast majority of well designed studies do not support policy or positions that exposures to indoor radon pose a significant threat to health, and indeed, the majority of those studies indicate that, at concentrations typically seen in homes, as the level of radon increases, the risk of lung cancer goes down, not up".
Wade Allison also considers it nothing to be concerned about. This, from his book 'Radiation and Reason'
"At a practical level it is plain that, in the absence of smoking, the health risk from radon is so small that it cannot be demonstrated, even in a thorough Europe-wide study."
As usual Harry is pooping in his pants over something he knows very little about.
Are you now saying the subsidies harry got to make his project viable that you complain of so bitterly makes him a fool, then?
:-)
I am not so sure that harry is, you know.
"From the radionuclides that are present in our bodies, the average man in the United States receives an effective dose of about 0.3 mSv each year. This is about one-tenth (or 10 percent) of the 3.1-mSv dose that the average U.S. man who weighs 70 kg receives each year from all sources of natural background radiation (not including medical sources)."
Now te average background on Dartmoor varies but this site has this to say about dnatural UK radiation
"There are a number of important radon hotspots in the UK. The most noticeable one is Cornwall in the south-west where the average UK background dose is 7.8 mSv, nearly three times the national average. This is due to the presence of igneous granite, which naturally contains more uranium (10-20 parts per million) than other rocks.
Radioactive areas tend to be hilly, where igneous rocks have been forced to the surface or left behind by the erosion of softer sedimentary rocks (the Chiltern Hills are particularly radioactive, for example). The Yorkshire Dales sit on top of an underground deposit of pink granite called the Wensleydale Granite that lies underneath the Askrigg Block, and the Peak District features many granite outcroppings."
Peak levels are over 20mSv/yr
For interest, Japan has set a limit of 2msV/yr as the cleanup criteria for Fukushima!
10 times 'cleaner' than Dartmoor is! and three and a half times 'cleaner' than the whole of Cornwall.!Chernobyl - well Pripyat in *2009* was already pretty safe. 20msv/y to
100 mSv/y away from the actual reactor (1 uSv/hr is about 80msV/yThere's still a lot of hotspots, but it's no less safe than Ramsar in Iran, a well known spa town.
Apperantly the inhabiatnts are radiation proof..
"People in some areas of Ramsar, a city in northern Iran, receive an annual radiation absorbed dose from background radiation that is up to
260 mSv y(-1), substantially higher than the 20 mSv y(-1) that is permitted for radiation workers. Inhabitants of Ramsar have lived for many generations in these high background areas. Cytogenetic studies show no significant differences between people in the high background compared to people in normal background areas. An in vitro challenge dose of 1.5 Gy of gamma rays was administered to the lymphocytes, which showed significantly reduced frequency for chromosome aberrations of people living in high background compared to those in normal background areas in and near Ramsar. Specifically, inhabitants of high background radiation areas had about 56% the average number of induced chromosomal abnormalities of normal background radiation area inhabitants following this exposure. This suggests that adaptive response might be induced by chronic exposure to natural background radiation as opposed to acute exposure to higher (tens of mGy) levels of radiation in the laboratory. There were no differences in laboratory tests of the immune systems, and no noted differences in hematological alterations between these two groups of people."
So no, Harry does need decomissioning but not because he is radioactive. Just because he is a total prat.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.