Re: Indeed
Some of them still have fuel in their reactors
That would be normal and the sensible way to handle them - whether naval or civilian power.
When first shut down, a reactor has fuel in it that's "quite active" with a lot of short-halflife highly active elements in it - intermediate fission products. Handling fuel in this state is hazardous.
But, leave it a while, and the most highly active stuff will have decayed - fundamentally something cannot be both long lived and highly active. The longer you leave it, the less active whatever is left will be.
Similarly, once you've removed the fuel, what's left behind will be radioactive as well - and that will decay in the same way, anything highly active will decay quickly. So you leave it a while.
For this reason, at one point the plan for things like the old Magnox reactors was to simply build a house sized block of concrete around the core (having removed everything else) and leave it for perhaps a century. You could post some guards in case someone wants to graffiti it, but really it's inert and poses no danger. After perhaps 100 years, there's nothing particularly active, and you could just cut a hole in the side, walk in, and carry out the old graphite moderator blocks by hand. Simple, safe, planned, no long term waste problem. But instead, ill-informed protestors don't want that simple and safe approach - they insist that things must be done while the graphite is still "hot", thus (at least in part) creating the nuclear waste problem they complain about.
But if you think about it, the longer you leave the reactor in the submarine, safe in it's steel and lead box, the less hazardous it will be to deal with when you do finally do it.
I've never had the opportunity to try it, but I bet you could wind up some "greens" by pointing out that some windmill towers are made with recycled and slightly radioactive steel from nuclear plants.
Analogy. If you've been cooking, the pots are a lot easier to handle if you let them cool down before trying to clean them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
