A highly effective decontamination technique is required for the recycling of material from decommissioned reactors and the decontamination of the spent fuel clad in future reprocessing. The plasma technique, based on the plasma etching process for producing semiconductors, is one of the candidates for an advanced alternative to the aqueous process using oxalic-acid solution. In this paper, we compare and discuss various plasma decontamination processes, the low-pressure and the atmospheric-pressure processes, also bringing into the discussion the processes, which we have developed. Consequently, we conclude the following. The low-pressure process is suitable for basic experiments and may be used in the decontamination process for alpha-ray emitters because of its advantage of confinement. The atmospheric-pressure process has an etching rate one or two orders higher than the low-pressure process. Therefore, the atmospheric-pressure process is superior for decontaminating wide areas such as the inner surfaces of reactor vessels. In particular, the non-equilibrium plasma process has the peculiar characteristic of being able to supply a great number of active atoms to the fluorination reaction without extra heat generation, and so it can be useful for this purpose.