This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A truck carrying a massive piece of an Illinois nuclear reactor arrives today in Utah.
The 225,000-pound nuclear reactor pressure-vessel head will be buried with other low-level radioactive waste at the EnergySolutions Inc. landfill in Tooele County.
The shipment is part of a unique cleanup project, the decommissioning of the defunct Zion nuclear power plant. EnergySolutions took over the plant site so that it could dismantle the reactors and decontaminate the 250-acre plant site north of Chicago.
The $1 billion cleanup contract is expected to take about 10 years to complete.
The large part being transported by truck — not, as previously reported, by train — will be put in the EnergySolutions landfill, and covered by dirt, debris and rock. Company spokesman Mark Walker described the shipment as routine for the mile-square site, where mildly contaminated parts from Pennsylvania and California are already buried.
Judy Fahys