Spain asks US to clean up site of 1966 nuclear accident
foxnews.com
foxnews.com
2. The Spanish government is currently renting the land from it's owners. I am very curious about the rent, as this land is currently useless. I don't know the details of Spanish law, but on the face this seems like a good case for eminent domain.
3. At this point, the cleanup process would involve moving dirt that contains trace amounts of radioactive material. This has been done before, but I think this would be both the largest effort and the one in which the dirt traveled the furthest (from Spain to the US, probably to a facility west of the Mississippi River.
4. Once the topsoil is removed, then what? Replace it with top soil harvested from someplace else? Start a project to restore the topsoil with lots of compost? It'll take another sixty years.
EDIT: This type of cleanup is an ideal use case for robotics, and I would love to see what technology they use to perform the cleanup. I imagine several semi-autonomous remote controlled tractor sized machines loading into containment boxes made of nine inch thick steel.
2. long term lease is common and not that expensive for agricultural land.
3. Well done in Fukushima, I think it is not that big of adifficulty. As it is low activity waste so old mines should do.
4. Renaturation is standard in for example open pit coal mines.
It's not _just_ the radiation; it's also pretty toxic, and, like a lot of heavy metals, the body struggles to get rid of it.
There are lots of things that exist in nature, that humans have been exposed to, and which we don’t have particularly good defenses against beyond the intelligence that enables “if a group of humans encounters this problem, some of them will die and the others will observe this and generally avoid it”.
>It has been estimated that a pound (454 grams) of plutonium inhaled as plutonium oxide dust could give cancer to two million people
IMAO feels like there is an increase in the perceived danger of a nuclear black swan (shaped as unnamed rogue agents using uncontrolled radioactive waste to make dirty bombs). The Putin war is clearly escalating. We are now at the massive launching of phosphorus bombs part so a "nuclear but not so much and unsigned" event is unfortunately closer than ever.
Probably is in the mutual benefit for both parts to take control over this stuff and put it in a safer place.
Ukraine – and the wave of interference in domestic affairs of NATO members Russia has engaged in particularly since the beginning of the 2014 conflict with Ukraine – are a big factor here.
A dirty bomb is unlikely because it could lead to escalations by Europe and the USA.
A dirty bomb has limited area of significant effect, using one in the part of Ukraine outside of the corridor of eastern and southern Ukraine Russia wishes to occupy might seem to make sense to Russian decision-makers.