Isotopes for Medicine and the Life Sciences (1995) / Chapter Skim
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A Waste Management
A Waste Management
Pages 103-112
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From page 103... ...
NATURE AND SOURCES OF LOW-LEVEL - RADIOACTIVE WASTE (LLRW) The Low Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act defines LLRW by exclusion in an attempt to distinguish mildly radioactive materials with relatively short half-lives from high level radioactive wastes that must be effectively isolated for many centuries to prevent serious harm to the biosphere.
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From page 104... ...
break out those totals by the type of generator: academic, which includes university hospitals and research facilities of all types; government; industrial, including pharmaceutical manufacturers; medical, which encompasses hospitals and clinics, nonuniversity research facilities, and private offices; and utility, which primarily includes the 76 active commercial nuclear power reactors. Industrial sources provided over half of the waste by volume, and utilities contributed over 85 percent of the radioactivity.
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From page 105... ...
level, however, disposal sites must be designed to protect both humans and the environment for 100 years. For example, institutional control of the site for a century is required, including measures to preclude inadvertent disturbance.
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From page 106... ...
to each person's annual exposure, but this obviously could be much greater in those with poor health or many injuries. The LLRW contribution, even for people living near disposal sites and the current exposure standards, are thus
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From page 108... ...
The Atomic Energy Act Amendments of 1959 opened the door to state administration of their own radiation safety programs, and by 1971 New York, Kentucky, Illinois, Washington, South Carolina, and Nevada owned LLRW disposal sites and had them operated by commercial contractors. By the late 1970s the first three of these had closed, one because it was full and two because of management problems and increased environmental concerns by state governments (and the public)
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From page 109... ...
To estimate the possible volume and costs of waste disposal by an accelerator facility of the sort proposed for NBTF, data were collected from the Tri-University Meson Facility cyclotron in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This facility typically has two disposal shipments per year.
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From page 110... ...
110 ~ ' o o .~ Cal .= a' ·3 o .
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From page 111... ...
New York is one of the states that will be left without access to a disposal site after July 1994, and although the state has begun the process of developing a site of its own, one of its first steps was a survey of its current LLRW generators' onsite storage capacities, their abilities to expand those capacities, and the economic viability of establishing a separate centralized storage site solely for Class A LLRW from medical and academic sources. The recently completed study (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, 1993)
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From page 112... ...
1993. Twenty Nagging Questions and Not-Necessarily-Satisfying Answers About LLW Management in the United States.
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