Page 29 - Beyond Decommissioning

10 Beyond Decommissioning

It may be worth stressing that the closure, decay, and the resulting need for rede-
velopment is not limited to large industrial buildings, viewed as the markers of a his-
toric era: in fact, architecture changes as fast as today’s world, and entire types of
buildings disappear almost before our eyes. See text box below.

Arch Daily (2018) identifies six types of structures that came to light in modern times and are fast
disappearing. Mostly inconspicuous and yet ubiquitous, the disappearance of these buildings
raises a sense of nostalgia, rather than intellectual consideration. According to Arch Daily
(2018), these six types are:

l Corner stores exist around the world, under many names: New York’s bodegas (in fact, a Span-
ish name), Australia’s milk bars, sari-sari stores in the Philippines. With the growth of large
shopping malls, the family-owned corner store has been on a fast decline;
l Easily recognizable and barely large for a person and a phone, public phone booths have ubiq-
uitously marked our society for decades. With the booming of the mobile phone, their fate was
sealed. Many countries e.g. Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden have eliminated pay phones alto-
gether, and their number continues to go down worldwide. Some cities have converted these
booths into wi-fi hotspots. In the United Kingdom, many of the iconic red phone booths have
been converted into tiny cafes, mobile phone repair shops, or defibrillators.
Video rental stores appeared and disappeared within 20 years or so. Among the few remaining
l
Blockbuster video stores in the United States are three stores in Alaska, where cold winters and
slower internet connections still make video rental appealing; and it is reported that one in
Oregon owes its survival to the local customers seeing it as more “personal” than Netflix
or other streaming sites.
l Gas stations. As fuel consumption has become smaller, and the price of land has escalated, a
lot of gas stations have been shut down. Their large areas and lack of contiguous structure are
good assets for such redevelopment options as art galleries, offices, and restaurants.
l Newsstands have ubiquitously dotted cities for many decades. The headlines attracted the
passers-by and so the stands became centers of social aggregation. Besides, newsstands pro-
vided prospective entrepreneurs with an objective of upward mobility. Digitalization is grow-
ingly but inevitably killing these structures.
l Since the 1960s, automated photo booths have allowed us to stay for a few minutes away from
the inquisitive crowd. Although the structure was tiny and basic, photo booths in shopping
malls or train stations allowed some intimacy. In principle the booths may have been intended
to produce passport photos, but the photos actually captured and preserved memories …

The redevelopment of industrial sites is a consolidated industry, and a lot of experi-
ence/expertise is available to reuse buildings, components, and the land. Unfortu-
nately, the prompt redevelopment of nuclear sites after decommissioning lags
behind and is not entirely optimized. Lessons learned during the redevelopment of
nonnuclear industrial sites should be communicated to the decision makers and stake-
holders in a nuclear decommissioning project, as well as to those responsible for site
planning, the very purpose of this book.
A precautionary note: “The biggest difference between time and space is that you
can’t reuse time (Merrick Furst, http://www.greatthoughtstreasury.com/author/
merrick-furst)”. Eventually former industrial sites will be redeveloped anyhow, but
typically such sites are kept idle for many years, often decades of no action until a