Brave Nuclearworld? - First Of Two Parts

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A few miles down an idyllic New England country road dotted with handsome homesteads and gentleman farms in central Connecticut sits the Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant—or what’s left of it. After shutting down in 1996, the 590-megawatt reactor is nearing the end of its decommissioning, a process spokesperson Kelley Smith describes as “construction in reverse.”

Most of the buildings, the reactor itself, and its components have been removed. Adjacent to the Connecticut River, the discharge pond, which received the reactor’s second-stage cooling water from the internal heat exchanger, is being dredged. The soil, including hot spots near the reactor that were contaminated with strontium-90 from leaking tanks, has been replaced. Forty concrete casks of highly radioactive spent fuel now sit on a fenced and guarded concrete pad surrounded by woods on the company’s property about three quarters of a mile from the reactor site. Soon the spent fuel pool that housed the irradiated fuel assemblies will be drained and dismantled. A twisted spaghetti-like tangle of metal protruding from a partially demolished building will be carted off to a dump site. Stories high stacks of steel containers packed with mildly radioactive rubble are also waiting to be taken away. One of the final tasks will be to demolish…