Page 156 - Beyond Decommissioning

Experience and lessons learned 137

belonging in the industrial heritage. Besides, the preservation and reuse of former NPPs
will benefit young generations as they see and touch the emblems of
contemporary NPPs.
Power plants offer a variety of special industrial and architectural features that
deserve to be preserved in the plant reuse. Industrial equipment formerly used for gen-
erating electricity, such as the turbines, smokestacks, steam pipes, or coal hoppers,
may seem problematic for redevelopment. However, the original features have been
preserved in reuse to maintain the plant’s identity and have even been used as a unique
marketing tools (e.g., a landmark). The presence of these structures and their histories
will enrich the culture of the local communities and the tourists.
Redundant power plants have been adapted to a range of new uses, for example:

l Museums (e.g., the Tate Modern, London, UK; the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery,
Toronto, Canada; Sydney Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia). These cases are
described in more detail in IAEA (2011).
l Restaurants
Hotels
l
In practice, most power plants have been converted into multiple uses. Besides many
examples given in the following sections, one case is given here as typical. In New Bra-
unfels, Texas, the Comal power plant was constructed in 1925 and operated until 1973.
The facility is adjacent to the Comal River and to the Landa Park, both of which are pop-
ular public recreational areas. The plant equipment was dismantled first. Environmental
issues included mainly asbestos and metals-based paints. The reuse of the facility was
determined by a request for proposal process in which any interested party was allowed
to submit a reuse proposal. The selected reuse was a commercial complex with loft apart-
ments, a hotel and restaurant open to the public. The adapted reuse of the building shell
was expected to work well with the public recreational activities nearby (Scadden, 2001).

6.1.1 Savannah River Site, SC, USA
The Savannah River Site (SRS) has a number of decommissioning projects underway.
For example, the partial dismantling and entombment of P and R reactors was com-
pleted a few years ago (Fig. 6.2).
Spent fuel from US and foreign research reactors is received and stored at the SRS
L Area Material Storage (L Basin) (WM, 2013). The L Area Material Storage Facility
is a former nuclear reactor built in the 1950s to produce materials for national defense
and scientific research. The facility contains a large water-filled basin that was used
for disassembly and interim cooling of targets prior to shipment to separation instal-
lations onsite. With the shutdown of the reactor and the completion of its production
program, the disassembly basin was converted to a storage facility for the onsite
inventory of DOE fuels formerly stored at the Receiving Basin for Offsite Fuel,
and also for receipt and storage of DOE fuels to be returned from the Domestic
Research Reactor and Foreign Research Reactor. In addition, the facility has the pos-
sibility to provide inter-area shipment of spent fuel to H-Area for processing. The SRS
K-reactor has been turned into a plutonium storage facility.