Water is the cheapest radiation shield anybody has ever found. That’s why spent fuel sits at the bottom of a pool for years instead of inside a concrete vault, and it’s why you can stand on the deck above one with nothing on you but a dosimeter.<\/p>\n
What I hadn’t thought about until I went through Sogin’s<\/a> decommissioning updates is that the trick scales up. At the old Garigliano plant in southern Italy, the state company tearing it down flooded the pit the reactor sits in and started taking the machine apart from above, through the water, with a grab on the end of a pole.<\/p>\n So how do you cut up a reactor nobody can stand next to?<\/p>\n Here’s the layout, because it isn’t obvious from outside. The reactor vessel is a steel cylinder, and it sits down inside a concrete pit called the reactor channel. Take the lid off the cylinder and you can fill the whole pit, drowning the vessel and everything bolted to it.<\/p>\n That’s what Sogin and its subsidiary Nucleco did at the end of 2023. Then they went after the first layer of hardware, the contaminated metal sitting on the deflector at the top of the vessel. Those components were pulled off and cut down under the water with a pneumatic clamp and remote mechanical gear, run from up on the platform with high-resolution underwater cameras for eyes. What came out weighed about 2,200 pounds (one metric ton) all together, and it’s now sealed in two high-integrity containers in one of the site’s temporary storage buildings. Sogin called that first phase finished on July 30, 2024.<\/p>\n One metric ton doesn’t sound like much for most of a year of work, and it isn’t. That’s sort of the point. Sogin describes this as the most complex job in any decommissioning, and Italy had never done it before.<\/p>\n In a technical poster its engineers presented to Italy’s radiation protection association, the team put the working water level about 10 feet above the vessel flange, which is the machined rim the lid bolts down onto. So the operators are looking down through roughly a story of water at the thing they’re chopping up. I can’t get at that poster myself and Sogin’s press material doesn’t give flooding levels, so treat the 10 feet as the engineers’ own figure rather than something two sources agree on.<\/p>\n Containment at Garigliano isn’t a dome or a silo. It’s a sphere. That’s why the plant is recognizable from the highway. Sogin staff have put it at about 48 meters across on plant tours, roughly 157 feet, with a steel skin a little over an inch thick.<\/p>\n Riccardo Morandi drew it in 1959. A sphere handles an internal blast better than a box does, and the plant’s own guides say the shape was also picked because it was easier on the eye than the alternatives. Locals call it the mozzarella, which is fairly generous of them.<\/p>\n It’s also permanently safe from the wrecking crew. Italy’s culture ministry declared the reactor building and the turbine hall architectural heritage, and the environmental decree covering the teardown carves both of them out. Sogin can gut the sphere down to bare steel and it still has to leave the ball standing. I think that’s a pretty great outcome, and it’s rarer than it should be. Most retired reactor buildings get demolished or, like the sodium-cooled unit that’s been sitting under a grass mound in Nebraska since 1969<\/a>, quietly buried where they stand.<\/p>\n Garigliano was a General Electric boiling water reactor, and Sogin calls it the first BWR built in Europe. Its plant brochure<\/a> lists 160 megawatts gross and 12.5 terawatt-hours generated over the plant’s working life.<\/p>\n It went into service in April 1964 and stopped in August 1978 for maintenance. It never came back. Italian coverage of the site puts that down to the cost of seismic upgrades on a plant that was near the end of its life anyway, and the shutdown became official in 1982, which is why you’ll see the operating period written both ways. Italy then voted nuclear power out in a referendum after Chernobyl, and Sogin took the site over in 1999.<\/p>\n All 523 fuel elements were gone by 1987. Most went to England for reprocessing and the rest went to the Avogadro facility at Saluggia, up north, bound for France. That kind of shipment still happens, in casks so heavy that ships get rebuilt around them<\/a>. So there hasn’t been fuel in that sphere for four decades. What’s left is the hardware itself, activated by neutrons back when the thing was running, and that’s a different problem and a much more manageable one.<\/p>\n The upper internals are out. Next are the lower internals, the metal that lived closest to the fuel and soaked up the worst of the neutron flux, and after that the vessel itself gets segmented and lifted out in pieces. All of it under the same water.<\/p>\n This is where the job starts looking like everybody else’s. In France, a robot called RODIN cut a 182-ton reactor plug from the bottom up<\/a> until the readings dropped far enough for people to walk in and finish it by hand. Garigliano is buying that same protection with water instead of distance. As far as I can tell it’s the lower-tech route.<\/p>\n Sogin hasn’t put a public date on when the vessel comes out. Its July 2024 announcement said the executive design for the internals removal had already been launched, which is a long way from a finish date on a first-of-a-kind job, so I’d take any year you see quoted with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n What is on the record is the meeting. Campania’s environment councillor, Claudia Pecoraro, reconvened the plant’s transparency table on July 15, 2026, after a gap of more than two years, with the mayors of Sessa Aurunca, Cellole, Castelforte and Santi Cosma e Damiano in the room alongside ISIN, ISPRA, ARPAC, Legambiente and WWF. Sogin told them what it tells everyone: lower internals first, then the vessel. The regional government<\/a> published the write-up the next day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Water is the cheapest radiation shield anybody has ever found. That’s why spent fuel sits at the bottom of a … <\/p>\nThe water is doing most of the work<\/h2>\n
The reactor lives inside a giant steel ball<\/h2>\n
So what was this thing when it ran?<\/h2>\n
Sogin says the lower internals come next<\/h2>\n