Raymond Shadis

It's a kind of inside joke, and a not-very-funny one at that.

Archer Mayor's latest police procedural novel, Presumption of Guilt, is set at Vermont Yankee. A decommissioning crew finds a body buried in a cement slab beneath a warehouse set for demolition.

Tres cool, though Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee would likely argue - as company officials did with buried pipes carrying radioactive material, notably tritium - that a body is not actually “buried” if it is encased in concrete (or a coffin) and not in direct contact with the soil.

In the real world of decommissioning, the “buried bodies” are areas of radiologically contaminated soil, concrete, or other objects, up to and including nuclear-fuel particles that were spilled, dumped, or otherwise released to the open environment sometime in the reactor's operating history.