High-Level Dollars, Low-Level Sense:
Chapter 3
Overview and Critique of the Current Approach to Radioactive Waste Management

Low-Level Waste

In the wake of the problems experienced at low-level waste burial grounds, new NRC regulations for the land disposal of low-level radioactive waste were developed, and were issued in 1983. ⁹⁴ According to the NRC, the reason for the new regulations was that the previously existing ones "[did] not contain sufficient technical standards or criteria for the disposal of the licensed materials as waste."⁹⁵

However, although the new standards may represent an improvement over the practically non-existent ones of the 1960s and 1970s, they are still fundamentally flawed. To understand these problems, we first must review the waste classification and disposal standards as they now exist.

The ABCs of Low-Level Waste Classification

As mentioned previously, low-level waste is a catch-all category of radioactive waste that is not actually defined with any reference to its "level" of radioactivity, but instead includes any waste that does not fall into other categories.

However, for the purposes of management and disposal of low-level waste, federal regulations do divide it into four classes which are determined by radioactivity level and longevity of half-life. These classes, as previously mentioned, are, in order of increasing hazard, named Class A, Class B, Class C, and Greater-than-class-C.

Table 10 contains the NRC radionuclide concentration limits which define the various classes of commercial low-level waste. Waste which only contains radionuclides in concentrations below their Class A limits is Class A waste. Low-level waste containing any radionuclide whose concentration exceeds the Class C limits for that nuclide is Greater-than-class-C waste.

As the table shows, the NRC divides the radionuclide contaminants of concern into what it refers to as "long-lived" and "short-lived" radionuclides.⁹⁶The long-lived limits in the table are determining, unless the "short-lived" radionuclide concentrations would place the waste in a more hazardous category.

For example, if low-level waste contains any "long-lived" radionuclide in concentrations greater than its Class A limits, and since there are no Class B limits defined for the "long-lived" nuclides, it is Class C waste (provided all concentrations are still below their Class C limits). Only if all "long-lived" radionuclide concentrations are below their respective Class A limits may the waste be classified as Class B if its concentrations are less than the "short-lived" radionuclide Class B limits.⁹⁷

In other words, Class B "low-level" waste may contain "short-lived" radionuclides in concentrations up to the Class B limits specified in the lower half of Table 10 . However, Class B low-level waste may not contain long-lived radionuclides in concentrations greater than Class A limits for "long-lived" nuclides in the upper half of this table. If any of the radionuclides in the "long-lived" category are present in concentrations greater than the limits for Class A, the waste is defined as Class C, or "Greater than Class C" depending on the concentration in comparison to the Class C limits.

(Note that plutonium-241 and curium-242 decay into long-lived radionuclides, which is why they are in the "long-lived" category despite half-lives which are shorter than many elements in the "short-lived" category.)

NRC Classification And Disposal Standards⁹⁸

The NRC regulations contain standards for land disposal of low-level radioactive wastes, and set specific technical requirements for near-surface disposal (less than 30 meters deep) of this waste.⁹⁹ These technical requirements vary by waste class, ranging from Class A, which has the least stringent packaging and disposal requirements, to Greater-than-class-C, which is "generally considered unacceptable for near-surface disposal." However, a careful examination of these standards reveals fundamental inconsistencies that raise serious questions about their adequacy.

Regarding the disposal site, the NRC regulations identify two principal methods of control to prevent excessive radiation exposure over the years to "inadvertent intruders" who might "occupy the site in the future and engage in normal pursuits without knowing that they were receiving radiation exposure." These two methods are: 1) "institutional control over the site after operations by the site owner to ensure that no ... improper use of the site occurs...."; or, 2) disposing of waste which would present an "unacceptable risk" to an intruder "in a manner that provides some form of intruder barrier that is intended to prevent contact with the waste."¹⁰⁰

The NRC regulations incorporate both types of controls. On the one hand, for example, they state that:

In addition, the regulations state that "[w]aste that will not decay to levels which present an acceptable hazard to an intruder within 100 years is designated as Class C waste."

Class C waste, must, for this reason, be disposed at a greater depth than other classes, or, if that is not possible, under an intruder barrier with an effective life of 500 years. "[A]t the end of the 500 year period," according to the NRC regulations, "remaining radioactivity will be at a level that does not pose an unacceptable hazard to an intruder or public health and safety."¹⁰²

In examining the NRC regulations, one is thus led to believe that the class limits listed in Table 10 were derived from the requirements imposed by these hazard definitions and time frames. However, even according to the NRC's own definitions of what is "hazardous" and what is "acceptable," the time frames of 100 and 500 years are logically incompatible with the class limit definitions, raising serious questions about their environmental and public health adequacy.

For example, as can be seen from Table 10, much of the "100-year" waste (waste Classes A and B), for example, will not decay to NRC-defined "acceptable" levels in 100 years. Consider nickel-63. Buried at Class B concentration levels of just under 70 curies per cubic meter, waste containing nickel-63 would still have a concentration of about 35 curies per cubic meter after the institutional control period of 100 years had elapsed. According to the NRC regulations, at this point the waste should have decayed to the point where it "will present an acceptable hazard to an intruder." Yet, at 35 curies per cubic meter, the waste, if retrieved from the disposal site and re-buried, would still be classified as Class B waste, since it has concentration levels which are 10 times higher than the Class A limits. As a matter of fact, this waste would take a total of well over 400 years to decay just to the Class A upper limits (at which point the NRC regulations would still define it as hazardous for another 100 years if it were being buried for the first time).

This analysis makes an even stronger case against the NRC regulations when applied to the Class C limits in Part A of Table 10, which pertains to "long-lived radionuclides." Class C waste, according to the NRC, is 500-year waste. Consider Class C waste contaminated with technetium-99, however. Buried at concentrations of just under the Class C limit of 3 curies per cubic meter, this waste will be hazardous according to NRC definitions for far longer than 500 years. It will take such waste over three half-lives -- some 640,000 years -- just to decay to the upper boundary of Class A levels.

The illogical nature of the above regulatory approach is made even more explicit in the NRC's discussion of the "long-lived" radionuclides in the waste. According to the NRC, in managing low-level waste,

In essence, here is an admission that the hazard due to long-lived radionuclides "will persist long after" the controls imposed by the regulations fade away. This is an extraordinary admission of the regulation's fundamental inadequacy right in the text of the regulation. The only thing the NRC regulations will apparently do with respect to the long-lived components of low-level waste, is push the hazard into the future, since NRC-mandated controls will, at most, only "delay the time when long-lived radionuclides could cause exposure." In the case of many long-lived radionuclides, they will continue to be present in almost exactly the same concentrations when institutional controls have lapsed as when they were first buried.

Clearly such regulations are inconsistent and do not provide a sound scientific basis for addressing the problems of radioactive waste disposal.

The orphaned Greater-than-class-C wastes appear to have no clear plan currently for their disposal. They are the most hazardous class, and for this reason are nominally slated for repository disposal by law and NRC regulation.¹⁰⁴ However, the DOE does not appear to be actively making plans for accepting them at Yucca Mountain, nor is it including these wastes in its estimates of repository system cost.¹⁰⁵ The DOE's position appears to be that it can exclude "greater than Class C" wastes from its planning for Yucca Mountain because the Nuclear Waste Policy Act does not mandate inclusion of these wastes.

Many of the problems with the current waste classification and disposal regulations in the U.S. derive from one simple factor. The various categories of waste are basically defined according to the process which produced them (uranium milling, reprocessing, etc.) and not according to the longevity or concentration of the radioactive materials. Thus we find ourselves in the rather odd situation of preparing to dispose of very hot, long-lived waste in shallow land burial, where it may eventually cause environmental and health damage, while at the same time consigning comparable or even less radioactive wastes to deep transuranic and high-level waste repositories.

No EPA Standards for Low-level Waste

It is noteworthy that there are no EPA standards which apply to "low-level" waste disposal. In this respect, the regulatory status regarding "low-level" wastes is even worse than the corresponding status regarding high-level and transuranic wastes.

The EPA has authority to develop such standards, and in 1983 (the same year that the NRC low-level waste regulations were promulgated) published its intention to develop generally applicable standards for low-level radioactive waste.¹⁰⁶ The EPA proceeded to develop a draft proposal for standards, but according to EPA officials, the agency has so far "been unable to issue it for public comment because of continuing unresolved differences with sister federal agencies."¹⁰⁷ This appears to be a reference to NRC and DOE disagreements with the EPA which has led the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to prevent them from being officially released. The NRC and DOE objections are apparently due to the fact that the proposed EPA standards are more stringent than existing NRC and DOE regulations.

Officials from the EPA say that their standard would improve on the existing regulatory regime for low-level waste in several ways:¹⁰⁸

• In addition to actual disposal, it would cover pre-disposal management, treatment and storage.
• The EPA standard is broader than existing regulations, covering DOE military low-level wastes as well as commercial wastes and setting standards for Naturally occurring and Accelerator-produced Radioactive Materials (NARM).

  (As previously mentioned in the section on radioactive waste characteristics, NARM wastes are orphan wastes not consistently regulated under any current standard, and in some cases they fall under no specific regulations at all because they occur outside the nuclear fuel cycle. NARM includes such materials as radium-226 and thorium-230 produced outside the nuclear fuel cycle, and radionuclides produced by particle accelerators. The EPA standard would require the disposal of high-concentration NARM wastes -- i.e. greater than 2 nanocuries per gram -- in a regulated, licensed disposal facility.)

• The EPA standard would establish a preventive approach to groundwater protection. This is an aspect that is entirely absent from the NRC standards, and, according to EPA officials, "is a part of [the EPA] draft standard that NRC strongly opposes." The EPA, however, warns that unless a stronger approach is taken towards groundwater protection, "many [low-level waste] disposal sites may end up on future Superfund lists."¹⁰⁹

Although it is not possible to judge these claims in the absence of the actual draft standard, it is clear that in the absence of more comprehensive standards than currently exist, there are many loopholes and deficiencies that will go unaddressed.

For example, low-level wastes generated at DOE facilities are not subject to the NRC regulations which apply to commercial waste, but are instead governed by internal DOE waste management policies which have historically been even more lax than the commercial NRC standards. The more recent stricter DOE waste management policy (issued in September 1988 but not expected to be fully implemented for several more years) does establish policies roughly parallel to the current NRC standards. Yet even these new DOE standards still allow burial of low-level waste in cardboard boxes under some circumstances, a practice that has been forbidden by NRC standards for commercial waste.¹¹⁰ The EPA standards could address such inconsistencies by imposing across-the-board regulations that would apply to both commercial NRC licensees and DOE facilities.

Additionally, as pointed out by the EPA, the advent of surcharges and volumetric quotas for low-level waste generators imposed by the 1985 Low-level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act has increased incentives for the creation of specialized away-from-generator facilities for processing, treatment, and storage of low-level waste. This means that pre-disposal management and storage activities are likely to increase greatly in coming years, resulting in greater potential for off-site exposure, spillage, and exposures from airborne effluents from centralized offsite storage and/or incineration facilities. Existing regulations governing such activities are fragmented. Further, because such facilities are not considered part of the nuclear fuel cycle, they are exempt from EPA's 25 millirem annual dose limit which applies to nuclear fuel cycle activities.¹¹¹ Instead, such facilities would only be subject to the 100 millirem limit imposed by NRC's standards.¹¹²

The complete absence of more comprehensive and stringent EPA standards is particularly critical at this time. This is because, as we will discuss below in the section entitled "Current Status and Problems With Disposal Plans," a number of new low-level waste management and disposal facilities are in the planning stages now. It is at this stage, during the siting, planning and design of a new generation of waste facilities, when comprehensive regulations can most effectively and efficiently have their intended protective effect. Failure to implement such standards now is only another example of how current U.S. waste policy, taken as a whole, is increasing both environmental risks and threatening to result in excessive financial expenditures in the future when we are forced to clean up the consequences of those additional risks.

• A. Spent Fuel, High-Level, and Transuranic Wastes
  • Background on Nuclear Waste Disposal Issues
  • Current Standards and Regulations for Long-Term Management
  • Interim Management for Spent Fuel: MRS and Onsite Storage
  • Environmental and Financial Risks of Currnet Programs
    • Transuranic Wastes at WIPP
    • Yucca Mountain
    • Risks of Continued Reliance on the DOE
• B. Low-Level Waste
  • History of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal
  • Current Standards and Regulations
  • Current Status and Problems with Disposal Plans
• C. Mill Tailings

• Preface
• Chapter 3: Overview and Critique of the Current Approach to Radioactive Waste Management
• Chapter 5: Summary and Recommendations
• Table of Contents to the Full Report
• Bibliography and References
• Ordering Information

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Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

Comments to Outreach Coordinator, ieer@ieer.org
Takoma Park, Maryland, USA

Last Updated October, 1996

94. NRC 1983a.
95. As cited in OTA 1989, p. 59.
96. "Short-lived" and "long-lived" are the designations used in the NRC regulations. It should be noted, however, that the "short-lived" category includes nickel-63, which has a half-life of over 100 years, meaning it could present a potential hazard for about 10 times that long, or over 1,000 years.
97. For wastes containing mixtures of radionuclides, a sum of fractions rule is followed. This means that the sum of all nuclide concentrations, each measured as a fraction of its limit for the class being considered, must be less than one in order for that class to apply. For example, consider a waste contains 100 curies/m3 of strontium-90, and 22 curies/m3 of cesium-137. Both of these concentrations exceed the Class A limits, so they must then be compared to the Class B limits (150 curies/m3 for strontium-90, and 44 curies/m3 for cesium-137). The strontium-90 fraction is 100/150, or 0.67; the cesium-137 fraction is 22/44, or 0.5. Since the sum of these fractions, 1.17, is greater than one, the waste may not be Class B, even though the individual concentrations are each below their respective Class B limits. Repeating the same process with the Class C limits results in a value of 0.019 less than one so the waste may be classified as Class C.
98. Much of this section is an expansion of the criticism raised in Saleska 1989, pp. III-4 - III-5.
99. NRC 1988b (10 CFR Part 61).
100. NRC 1988b (10 CFR Part 61.7[b][3]).
101. NRC 1988b (10 CFR Part 61.7[b][4]). It should be noted that in another part of the regulations, the assurances here about a 100-year limit to the hazard notwithstanding, Class B is lumped with Class C, where the regulations state that for both of these classes, their "waste forms or containers should be designed to be stable, i.e., maintain gross physical properties and identity, over 300 years". [10 CFR 61.7(b)(2)]. The NRC does not explain why waste that is supposedly hazardous for only 100 years is required to be in a form or container that will last 300 years.
102. NRC 1988 (10 CFR Part 61.7[b][5]).
103. NRC 1988b (10 CFR Part 61.55[a][1]).
104. The 1985 Low-level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act (LLRWPAA) assigned responsibility for the disposal of Greater-than-class-C waste to the federal government that is, to the DOE. NRC regulations "require disposal of greater-than-class-C low-level radioactive waste in a deep geological repository unless disposal elsewhere has been approved," (NRC 1989b, p. 22578).
105. The DOE's cost assessment of the repository program only includes consideration of spent fuel, high-level reprocessing waste, and disposal of low-level waste generated in the process at conventional low-level waste burial sites. The study's assumptions explicitly state that "Other types of potentially high-level wastes have not been included" in the analysis (DOE 1989b, p. B-3).
106. Referred to in EPA 1990b, p. 1.
107. EPA 1990b, p. 7.
108. EPA 1990b.
109. EPA 1990b, pp.4-5.
110. DOE 1988b, p. III-7. 112. NRC 1991 (10 CFR Part 20). Note that the 100 millirem dose limit for individual members of the public from NRC licensees is the result of recent changes to the NRC's standards for protection against radiation at 10 CFR Part 20. The old standards which had been in effect from the 1960s, limited doses to members of the public from NRC licensees to 500 millirems.