[SOUND] Nuclear reactors are very intense capital investments. And their operating costs is relatively low. And that means if you operate them over a long enough time, they're an extremely inexpensive source of electricity. At the end though, you do have a plant that maybe has operated 40, 50 years, and because neutrons make things radioactive, the reactor vessel itself is radioactive. It falls into that category of low-level waste. The high-level waste is always contained in the fuel, and that fuel has been taken out. But the reactor vessel, because now perhaps it's weaker, perhaps some things have broken, needs to be decommissioned. Has to be taken apart and treated as low-level waste, basically buried someplace. So, what's the process by doing this? Well first, you let the things sit for a couple of years. And that makes a lot of sense, because anything that was extremely radioactive, meaning it has a short half life, will have decayed away into less radioactive or non radioactive material. And then there's a time period where you can go through steps of securing it, maybe eventually taking it all apart, decommissioning it. There's no real hurry. The reactor plant isn't hurting anybody sitting there. You can still walk around it, these are low levels of radioactivity. And then finally, you could perhaps use the land again, because again the land didn't become radioactive, it's just you had a radioactive structure on it you had to remove. Well this process is actually happened in the US at a number of locations, and this means we understand the economic implication. You can see that there's some acronyms here. A safe store is where they basically take the hardest things apart, and it sits there. Decommissioned, decom means it's totally gone. And then there is even things where you basically are having it as a spent fuel facility. Where you put the spent fuel there. You still have people working. You're still watching it and guarding it. But it's a great place to store the spent fuel until there's a more permanent repository. The shipping port reactor was the first commercial US reactor, and it closed in 82. And it's been completely taken apart. There's the Indian Point nuclear reactor, again a large commercial reactor. It ended its life in 72, and it's been fully decommissioned. There's a large list that I have, and so the costs are well known. Unfortunately, early on there was a law in congress that said out of every kilowatt hour of electricity you sell you need to save a little bit of that profit. Something on the order of a tenth of one cent of every sale that goes into a decommissioning fund. So that at the end of your reactor's life, there is a pot of money there to be able to take it apart. And the utilities have done that, and they've done it quite well. The costs today are about 300 to $400 million to take apart a nuclear reactor. And that money is there. That money is monitored by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make sure that there is going to be enough. Sometimes there is adjustments made in terms of the amount a particular utility has to charge the customers or maybe even decrease that amount, because they want to make sure that this money is there and earmarked for only that purpose. And the system has worked quite well. In addition to just talking about it, I have some personal experience in the commissioning. You see, at the University of Illinois, we had a research reactor. And this research reactor was a type made by GE called a Trigger. Training, research, education, general atomics, reactor. And it was started in 1960. And this is the trigger reactor at Illinois. Well, 1960 was quite sometime ago, and the reactor had a wonderful very useful lifetime, not just for research, but also for education. Lots of tours would go to the reactor. I remember running a lab class there to use the neutrons that were coming out. The reactor is a fairly impressive building. You've got people on it. The reactor core is down below the central part. In fact, if you look down here, you're looking into the water, and the core is at the very bottom and the water is very good shielding. So all of this took place, but 1960 to about the year 2000, that's 40 years, that was the reactor license. The technology is 1960s technology. Maybe there's some things you could do. But the decision was made to decommission. And in this decision to decommission, they actually had a deal back from the 1960s with the federal government, that they would take the spent fuel. And that's excellent, because the spent fuel, the stuff inside those fuel rods, is the high level waste. So that's gone. Now we have a reactor vessel, inside those massive blue pieces of concrete, that is radioactive. And some of the concrete, at least the stuff near us may be slightly radioactive. You gotta take it apart. So, we did. Certified work crew monitored everything else, start going in and basically cut things apart. I have people cutting off pipes, right? Sawing off all the things that go into the building, even the pieces of concrete. How do you dismantle this? Well, you saw it off and you cut piece by piece away, and when you do this, it eventually ends up in a truck. And the truck will take it to a low-level waste repository. When you get down a bit further and the concrete's very thick, then you have to maybe take it apart in the form of rubble. At least drilling out certain beam parts which you could take away and encase. And this stuff eventually also ends up bundled and put on a truck, and taken away and buried. So the decommissioning process took several years, and now we have an empty building. I think that we should have left the empty building, and we could use it for all sorts of good stuff. But the decision was to green field, meaning taking the whole structure, the whole building and turning it back into a green field. This is the reactor building here on the left. Fairly good sized building with a nice overhead crain. And they needed to take it apart. Now since this building was built in the 1950s, there was insulation of heating pipes and the like with asbestos. Now asbestos, of course, is just fine if it's all enclosed, but if you breathe it, you can get a very serious lung disease and lung ailment. So if you're going to take down the building, you have to perfectly put it into a plastic bag. This is somewhat so this asbestos dust doesn't get places. So I have the plastic bag around it, took out all the stuff inside. You're left with the steel super structure and they actually took the steel super structure down All right, and ended up with a hole in the ground. And now, it is simply grass right there. No record we even had a nuclear reactor on campus. Decommissioning works, it's being paid for every watt you buy, and it's a relatively straight forward system. That's what you need to know. [MUSIC]
