Page 11 - Beyond Decommissioning

x Preface

social, economic, environmental, and other forms of well-being. Finally, this book
will provide information and guidance to a multitude of potential stakeholders whose
interests center on decommissioned facilities and sites.
The main objective of this book is to circulate information and lessons learned on
new productive uses of nuclear facilities and sites at the completion of
decommissioning and after partial or total release from regulatory control. This is also
meant to leverage the value of assets (land, buildings, and infrastructure) that can alle-
viate the economic burden of decommissioning.
On the international scale, this subject area has received limited attention. As an
independent treatise, it has only been addressed in full by two IAEA reports:
Redevelopment of Nuclear Facilities after Decommissioning, Technical Reports Series
No. 444, IAEA, Vienna, 2006, and
Redevelopment and Reuse of Nuclear Facilities and Sites: Case Histories and Lessons
Learned, Nuclear Energy Series No. NW-T-2.2, IAEA, Vienna, 2011.
Both edited by the author of this book, and needing updating in the light of consid-
erable progress acquired over the last 10 years. The information provided for individ-
ual facilities in those two IAEA publications has not been repeated here unless updates
on reuse strategies for those facilities had been disclosed more recently. Therefore, the
book’s main focus is given to advances and achievements over the last 10 years (i.e.,
after all references for IAEA No. NW-T-2.2 had been assembled), and to the state of
the art in the reuse and redevelopment of contaminated facilities and sites. This
reflects in most references quoted, which have been published since 2009 or so. How-
ever, some fundamental references have been quoted to set the basis for further
elaboration.
Any good redevelopment project should involve a process of looking both nation-
wide and internationally at precedents, to learn from others’ experience and lessons
learned. The lessons learned from similar projects, either by consultants or clients,
are often available through publications or archived documentation. However, visits
to ongoing projects of similar nature or direct feedback from those directly involved in
those projects are indispensable to ensure success. This approach is the foundation of
this book.
The redevelopment of nonnuclear assets has been a common practice long before
nuclear reuse was even envisioned as an independent discipline. In recognition of the
predominant edge acquired by the nonnuclear sector, a large share of this book is
devoted to the achievements of nonnuclear industrial sites; and an attempt has been
made to compare those achievements with options available to nuclear sites (still
mostly at the planning stage). Learning from the nonnuclear sector serves another
objective this book is devoted to. In the author’s opinion, one of the plights affecting
the nuclear sector comes from the inside, namely from the perfectionism the nuclear
community inflicted upon themselves. The root cause of this perfectionism lies in the
original sin of the nuclear energy, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The horror
raised by these events pressured the nuclear community toward creating a perfect con-
trol system—in an imperfect world. For the nuclear world, the refusal to accept any
standard less than perfect resulted in over-conservatism, frustration, isolation, and an