Bloomberg has an article (here it is) about tearing down Vermont Yankee. Apparently it’s going better than planned – the site may be ready for redevelopment by late 2026, four years earlier than planned.
This detail surprised me: “There’s 1.2 million gallons that were used in the reactor that also have to be pumped into tanker trains. After transport by rail to Texas, that water— almost enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools— will be mixed with the chemical bentonite to turn it into a solid so it can be safely buried for perpetuity alongside the reactor and other material from the plant.”
Like many of you, I wish they’d been able to keep VY going for climate change reasons.
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Oh, I guess the reactor and other material is going to Texas. It’s not coming back here.
I wonder what’s in the water, as in “why not evaporate the water to concentrate the radioisotopes?” I suppose there might be tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, so that rules out evaporation.
I wish people understood that we (especially in the granite state) are surrounded with radiation. I bought a radiation meter recently and have enjoyed finding random hot spots. E.g. 0.70 µSv/h (microSieverts per hour – replaces millirems per hour) in Franconia Notch’s Flume trail and 1.40 µSv/h at cruising altitude on a Thanksgiving trip to Seattle. Sorry about the CO2. The meter arbitrarily calls 1-10 µSv/h “high.”
At home on the 2nd floor my background level is about 0.12 µSv/h, I think mostly from granite and some from cosmic ray muons.
You missed the spot on interstate 89 where the radiation was so high in one of the ledge cuts that they fought over whether or not to put up no stopping signs They finally decided that signs would scare the tourists.