Illinois: 'How to Dismantle a Nuclear Power Plant'

from the atlantic........

"About four million cubic feet of radioactive waste is expected to be moved to Utah and then entombed in clay and rock".


..........."Zion, Illinois, executives from EnergySolutions were still deciding how best to begin dismantling a nuclear power plant that had been permanently shut down more than a dozen years earlier.

"The plant was built in 1973 and the first of two reactors started producing power in December of that year. The second reactor came online nine months later, in September 1974. Located on the Lake Michigan shoreline, the plant sits about 40 miles north of Chicago, the largest city between the United States' two coasts, as the crow flies, and 50 miles south of Milwaukee. The Zion Nuclear Power Station, as it is officially known, supplied power to Chicago and the northern quarter of Illinois.


It is only one of over 60 nuclear power plants in the United States, a country with more than 100 reactors licensed to operated. All together, those reactors are responsible for nearly 20 percent of the country's total electric energy generation and make the U.S. the world's largest supplier of commercial nuclear power. With demand for nuclear power softening, though, there is only one reactor currently under construction in the U.S. (Watts Bar, Tennessee). Of the 100-plus reactors operating across the country, construction started on all of them in 1974 or earlier.

Eventually, those plants will no longer be safe to operate and will need to be dismantled. The current situation at Zion, if all goes according to plan, could provide one blueprint for proceeding with that act. Still, Sen. Kirk is not going to get his way. While the buildings will be torn down, the Midwest's water supply will never be completely safe until the U.S. figures out where to store all of its radioactive waste. There's no chance that a massive tsunami like that which took down the Fukushima plant will hit Lake Michigan and flood Zion, but Kirk isn't the only one who fears a terrorist attack".............LINK