Nuclear Reactor Finishes Journey

A decommissioned 1,000-ton nuclear reactor vessel finished its voyage up the Columbia River in Richland, Wash., docking safely just miles from a burial site for radioactive waste. It took about 36 hours for two tugs to bring the vessel, emptied of its uranium fuel, up 270 miles of river from the dismantled Trojan Nuclear Plant west of Portland, Ore. “It went very well,” said Steve Nichols, project manager for Portland General Electric, the utility decommissioning the largest commercial reactor ever taken off line in the United States. The river voyage past Portland made it the first commercial reactor of that size and level of contamination to pass so near a major American city.