Page 283 - Beyond Decommissioning

264 Beyond Decommissioning

6.7.5 Roads, railroads, viaducts, parking lots, garages

All nuclear and other industrial sites are equipped with railways, roads, and tracks,
which were used during the site’s operating history to transfer equipment, spare parts,
portable instruments, or simply foodstuffs and drinks to and within the site; and waste
and discarded materials from the site. Onsite connections for pedestrians, cars, and
trucks also served to ensure the regular movements of people between working places,
canteens, or social gatherings. When a site ceases to operate as initially planned, these
connections may remain to service new functions of the site (e.g., a nonnuclear tech-
nological park), and may be altered accordingly; or else they may be converted to
entirely new applications. A range of conversion cases are given below (several from
the nonnuclear sector, but readily applicable to nuclear sites).

6.7.5.1 Railroads
A brief description of the T Building at Mound Site, OH, USA has been given in
Section 6.3. Mound was a nuclear weapons production center. A rail spur is shown
in Fig. 6.48. Initially, this spur carried irradiated targets from DOE reactors for extrac-
tion of Po210 at the Mound Lab. Then it carried batches of Po210/Beryllium initiators

Fig. 6.48 DOE Mound Lab
Railroad Spur.
Credit to DOE.