The awareness: 1970s

Abstract

The 1970s is the decade when full recognition was given to decommissioning as an independent, integrated science and industry. To mark this recognition, one has to look at major national and international conferences that took place in this period, and the large number of attendees. Some detail is given in this chapter to the first decommissioning project for a commercial nuclear power reactor, Elk River (1974). The 1970s signaled also a critical issue (later named “clearance levels”), which has been haunting the decommissioning industry since and still does, although hopefully to a lesser degree in future. Appendix 1 to this chapter describes the history of clearance levels until now. But the Three Mile Island accident (TMI 1979) although not the first nuclear accident, made the nuclear community consider, and take action for, the possibility that a nuclear reactor had to be decommissioned following a serious accident; these circumstances require a specific decommissioning strategy. A brief overview of nuclear accidents and their impact on subsequent decommissioning is given in Appendix 2 to this chapter. A third Appendix expands on another critical issue, the decision-making in decontamination: it shows that the development of the decommissioning industry brought about the understanding that many more factors are involved in the selection of a decontamination strategy than the mere removal of contamination (i.e. the decontamination factor).