Smoldering nuclear bombs

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Nuclear power plants are not "alternative energy", but a threat to all life on the planet. The danger that a cloud of asteroid debris will move along the Earth's orbit instead of the Third Planet is quite tangible - an explosion of such power can occur at any nuclear power plant.

For example, the critical mass of uranium-235, at which a nuclear explosion begins, is 50 kg. The diameter of such a ball only 17 cm … And any nuclear power plant contains hundreds of tons of radioactive fuel, plus several thousand tons of "heavy" water, and in the worst-case scenarios, such an amount could lead to an explosion of cosmic proportions. Whether the planet will be split into small parts, or will simply be ripped from orbit, is no longer so important.

The "father" of the Soviet atomic energy Igor Kurchatov called nuclear reactors "smoldering bombs". And the Nobel laureate, physicist Pyotr Kapitsa defined nuclear power plants as "bombs that generate electricity."

In less than a hundred years, more than 16 serious atomic accidents have occurred, some of which could become fatal, but did not. There is reason to believe that the most catastrophic scenarios are blocked by external forces, which once again shows the unreasonableness of humanity.

There are 439 power reactors in the world, of which half - 218 - are concentrated in the USA, Japan and France. Already today 38% of the world's power units (166) are over 30 years old and need to be decommissioned, and 83% are over 20 years old.

Nuclear plants need to be closed and deactivated, but the shocking fact is that the experience of decommissioning nuclear-radiation hazardous facilities as it was not, so it is not.

Below are the facts that the only activity with nuclear waste is their transfer from place to place, up to the idea of shitting not only on Earth, but also to send waste to Space.

Nuclear cleaning

The second stage of the elimination of the radioactive "legacy" is underway in Russia

On our vast territory, there is no region left where a peaceful or military atom would not "inherit". There are 1268 places for long-term storage of radioactive waste (RW) in the country. Accumulated volumes reach, according to official data, more than half a billion cubic meters and continue to grow.

According to Rosatom, the filling of storage facilities with spent nuclear fuel at some NPPs already in 2008 reached a critical 90%, and if the accumulation is not stopped, it threatens to shutdown the stations.

Until recently, the Techensky cascade of reservoirs in the Chelyabinsk region was in a critical state, where from 1949-1956. waste water from the Mayak production plant is discharged. In 1957, an explosion of highly radioactive waste occurred at the plant, and the so-called East Ural trail was formed, which spread to several regions in the Techa-Irtysh-Ob river basin. Lake Karachay, which has been a storage facility for liquid radioactive waste of the same PA "Mayak" since 1950, accumulated by 2008 more than 200,000 cubic meters. m of highly radioactive waste with a radiation power of more than 120 million curies - the scale of two Chernobyls. There is no reliable isolation from the environment of other open water bodies - settling basins, tailings, where a significant amount of radioactive waste is also accumulated.

Alas, in our country there is no experience in decommissioning nuclear-radiation hazardous facilities, for example, nuclear power plant reactor units that have served their time, therefore more than 350 such facilities have simply been shut down. The sites of peaceful nuclear explosions have not been rehabilitated.

It is estimated that only 30 organizations of the industry of the territories contaminated with radionuclides - 474, 7 sq. km. All these problems increase the risk of radiation accidents with the consequences of going beyond industrial sites. And how do you calculate in square kilometers other deadly "footprints" left over 50-70 years throughout our large country? The largest of them are Chernobyl, Semipalatinsky, on Novaya Zemlya, at the bottom of the seas and in the bays of the Murmansk region and the Far East, where from Soviet times there were cemeteries for nuclear submarines and other ships of the nuclear fleet with unloaded fuel …

Scientists comprehend the secrets of the split atom, and learned from bitter mistakes to use its energy and control it, so that behind every scientific and engineering success there is a shadow of tragedy: contaminated territories unsuitable for living and running a household, ruined health, the growth of cancer, genetic defects, human lives themselves are the price of progress. Until now, all over the world there are only two ideas for the final disposal of radioactive waste - burial in the bowels of the earth or sending into space …

For many years, the handling of this kind of waste - collection, movement, disposal - was carried out according to the principle of deferred decisions. But, as we can see, it has already become impossible to postpone decisions, so in 2011 we had the first federal law in this area "On radioactive waste management", which made changes to the environmental policy in relation to all types of radioactive waste and was designed to put them in order. A state strategy has emerged, a regulatory framework, infrastructure and much more have begun to take shape.

At least, now we know what was previously carefully hidden, and no one had a clear idea of the amount and extent of radionuclide contamination in the country.

“In December last year, the implementation of the first federal target program on nuclear and radiation safety from 2008 and for the period up to 2015 was completed, which, in fact, can be called preparatory,” says Denis Pleshchenko, head of the FSUE “RosRAO” communications department. - In general, this stage allowed us to conduct a survey of facilities and territories, come to a systematic understanding of the situation, search for the most effective solutions to problems, develop projects for decommissioning facilities and remediation of contaminated areas, and find solutions to the most urgent urgent problems. Today, about 50 innovative technologies have been implemented, which make it possible to reliably and safely isolate the nuclear "legacy" for the entire period of their potential danger.

As a result of the implementation of the first target program, by 2016 the filling level of spent nuclear fuel storage facilities was reduced to 74%, a more safe "dry" storage facility for nuclear waste was put into operation, a Center for Conditioning and Long-Term Storage of RW with automated and robotic equipment was put into operation in the Murmansk Region. nuclear and radiation hazardous work with fuel assemblies of reactors of the nuclear fleet. More than 2.3 million kW m of radiation-contaminated areas have been rehabilitated.

- Problems that caused alarm in the distant Soviet times have been resolved. For example, dams on the Techensky cascade have been reconstructed, - Pleshchenko continues. “Today, reservoirs are a closed system, sewage treatment plants, additional hydraulic structures, thresholds-regulators have been built, and other measures have been taken to ensure long-term and controlled operation of the cascade. Lake Karachay was filled up and three more open reservoirs were liquidated, that is, the spread of radionuclides was prevented.

The law on radioactive waste management differentiated waste into historical, accumulated before July 2011, and newly generated after this date.

Responsibility for the dangerous "legacy", including financial, is assigned to the state, and the owner - the enterprise that "gave birth" to them, is responsible for the storage and processing of new formations.

For general management, a special body “National operator for radioactive waste management” (FSUE “NO RAO”) was created. According to Nikita Medyantsev, head of the public relations center of NRAO RAO, an initial inventory and registration of storage sites for radioactive waste accumulated before July 2011 was carried out throughout the country. These facilities include radioactive waste storage and disposal facilities located in 15 territorial districts - the former structure of IC "Radon". They did not accept nuclear waste, but only low- and intermediate-level ones: materials, sources of ionizing radiation used in medicine, gas complex, radioscopy, science, in devices. As part of the creation of a unified state system (USS) for radioactive waste management in accordance with the IAEA international safety standards, work was carried out to bring historical radioactive waste to a state that meets the acceptance criteria for transfer to the National Operator. Their further fate will be decided at the level of the Russian government. Most of these objects remain in temporary storage location. For example, the Saratov branch of the Privolzhsky territorial district "RosRAO". According to its director Alexander Kovylin, a new modern ground storage facility has been built at the enterprise to receive newly received radioactive waste from 8 regions. It was also loaded with the contents of five that had served their term from 1964-1967. old repositories buried in the ground. The place of their "historical" placement has been completely cleared. The new facility is more convenient to monitor and safer for the environment. At the storage point of the Leningrad branch (Sosnovy Bor), reconstruction was carried out with the equipment of the most modern technological complex, which provides for conditioning and processing of almost all types of radioactive waste.

Technological modernization of such an object in the city of Novouralsk, Sverdlovsk region made it possible to transfer it to the status of a burial ground. The filling will begin this year, and it will be, according to experts, a landmark event.

“Today, the disposal of radioactive waste is not officially conducted, except for the injection of liquid waste into deep underground horizons in the Krasnoyarsk Territory (Zheleznogorsk), the Tomsk Region (Seversk) and the Ulyanovsk Region (Dmitrovgrad),” explained Nikita Medyantsev. - And for long-lived nuclear waste, there is a unique burial project at a depth of 500 meters near the city of Zheleznogorsk. The chosen location in gneiss, a superhard rock that is stronger than granite, can withstand an explosion that is several times more powerful than Hiroshima. Today, at this depth, the construction of an underground research laboratory is already beginning, which will give an answer about the possibility of such isolation of especially hazardous nuclear waste.

According to Pleshchenko, it is difficult to solve the problem of lifting two submarines with nuclear fuel from the bottom of the Kara and Barents Seas. It must be said that the department has accumulated unique experience in the liquidation of a ship cemetery: 195 of more than 200 nuclear submarines and maintenance ships withdrawn from the Navy have been unloaded and disposed of, and the fuel has been sent to a long-term storage facility, but the work on lifting the nuclear submarine from the seabed is too expensive and It is difficult to fully finance it only from the Russian budget. The issue of international participation in cleaning the seas from sunken ships with unloaded fuel is being considered.

In 2016, the second stage of the Big Cleanup began, and this will already be, as experts promise, systematic, systematic work that will stop the accumulation of spent nuclear fuel, create new facilities for the final isolation of radioactive waste, rehabilitate contaminated areas, decommission hazardous facilities or until “Green” lawn, or up to “brown” - for industrial use by conversion.

If you look into the history of the issue of getting rid of the radioactive inheritance, then the beginning was most likely laid by the Chernobyl disaster.

In 1992, I had the opportunity to get acquainted with the results of an aerogamma-spectrometric study of the territory of Russia, carried out for the first time by the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology of Roshydromet and the Russian Academy of Sciences. If it was already known about the contamination of the areas adjacent to the accident site in the Bryansk, Kaluga regions or the Republic of Belarus, then the map of the Penza region, far from this place, in lilac spots of varying degrees of curie intensity, made you just gasp. My family has always tried to buy delicious Penza potatoes, and they grow on what land, with cesium seasoning! The Chernobyl footprint - an increased content of cesium-137 in the soil - was recorded in 15 regions of Russia, and along the way, during the study, experts identified "forgotten" and nowhere accounted for burial grounds of various types of radioactive waste. For example, in the city of Engels, Saratov Region, on the territory of a meat processing plant. Or - sources of ionizing radiation at a factory, in a school physics classroom, in a university laboratory. "Zvezda Wormwood" gave people a good shake, forced to isolate such "finds" with the removal of many tons of soil and to increase the reliability of nuclear power plants.

But still, the main volumes of deadly waste were supplied by the military and defense industry. Previously carefully hidden information about the hard-to-control consequences of nuclear technologies is now known.

But we are still defenseless against a danger that cannot be identified by taste, color or smell! You do not know where it will "arrive" from and how much you will get. Air and water cannot be divided by borders, and so much dirt, including radiation, has accumulated that a clean place on Earth can no longer be found.

It is known that after testing an atomic bomb at a test site in Semipalatinsk, or in the American state of Nevada, or in China, a radioactive cloud could circumnavigate the globe in a matter of weeks or drift for 1-3 months, scattering radionuclides everywhere.

Not so long ago I was told that the explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant was recorded on the Volga by the monitoring devices of the Balakovo nuclear power plant. The planet Earth is truly small, and how quickly we polluted it with artificially created radiation! The dead cities of Pripyat and Slavutich, dozens of villages on the banks of the Techa River have been abandoned by people, the territory of VURS contaminated with strontium-90 for 700 sq. km, turned into a special reserve, like a stalker zone, where you cannot enter - the listing can be continued. But nature, like an emergency reactor, cannot be covered with a sarcophagus, and no money will be enough to drain the "luminous" lakes and swamps, block strontium rivers, dig up cesium fields and drive the nuclear Genie into the bowels of the earth. This is what is thinking on the eve of June 5, International Day for the Protection of the Environment. I do not like these regular dates. The idea itself is correct - joining efforts, drawing attention to environmental problems around the world. But it would be better for the whole world, at least following the example of the first experience of Russia, to arrange a large planetary cleaning.