Clean-up to start on tons of liquid radioactive trash from all 4 of Chernobyl’s nuclear reactors

Bellona 7th Feb 2018, In a major step toward cleaning up the world’s worst nuclear disaster,
workers at Chernobyl have begun moving much of the stricken facility’s
liquid nuclear waste into long term storage.

The commissioning of Chernobyl’s liquid radioactive treatment plant is meant to tackle the
22,000 tons of irradiated water gathered not only since the plant’s
number 4 reactor exploded in 1986, but from continued operation of the
plant’s other three reactors, which continued producing electricity for
14 years after the disaster.

Surprisingly, these reactors were not decommissioned until 2000, nine years after the collapse of the Soviet
Union, when the Chernobyl plant became the newly-independent Ukraine’s
inheritance from Moscow. That the rest of the plant’s reactors continued
to operate in the middle of a irradiated disaster zone serves shows how
heavily Ukraine has depended on nuclear power since it struck out on its
own. That dependence – despite atomic energy’s domestic unpopularity
– hasn’t dropped with time: Kiev still relies on its other 15 reactors
to produce a little over half the country’s electricity.
http://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2018-02-chernobyl-starts-tackling-its-liquid-radioactive-waste

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https://www.ecoshock.org/

Paul Beckwith, Climate System Scientist

The climate change threat to nuclear power

By Natalie Kopytko “…………The final problem is droughts, which climate models predict will become longer and larger. Legal battles have already been fought in the US over scarce water resources in regions with nuclear power plants, including the Catawba river basin in the Carolinas and the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint river basin in Georgia, Florida and Alabama. These battles show us that adapting our systems – including nuclear power – to a reduced supply of water will not be easy.

The International Atomic Energy Agency advises the nuclear industry to build power plants to last for 100 years. Given that climate models don’t agree on what to expect within this time period, it is not at all clear how this can be achieved.

New reactors could use dry or hybrid systems with lower water requirements, but the costs of running these systems are likely to be prohibitive. Considering nuclear power plants already have problems with construction cost overruns, any additional costs are likely to meet resistance.

What is to be done? Most forms of energy generation are vulnerable in some way to the effects of climate change, and the fact that nuclear power is among them is yet another argument against a wholesale shift towards this source of energy.

The bottom line is that if nuclear power is to be used to mitigate the effects of climate change, it must also be capable of adapting to them. There are serious doubts that it can. more https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028138-200-the-climate-change-threat-to-nuclear-power/

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