Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, nuclear decommissioning, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons reprocessing. The storage and disposal of radioactive waste is regulated by government agencies in order to protect human health and the environment.
Hazardous waste is waste that must be handled properly to avoid damaging human health or the environment. Waste can be hazardous because it is toxic, reacts violently with other chemicals, or is corrosive, among other traits. As of 2022, humanity produces 300-500 million metric tons of hazardous waste annually. Some common examples are electronics, batteries, and paints. An important aspect of managing hazardous waste is safe disposal. Hazardous waste can be stored in hazardous waste landfills, burned, or recycled into something new. Managing hazardous waste is important to achieve worldwide sustainability. Hazardous waste is regulated on national scale by national governments as well as on an international scale by the United Nations (UN) and international treaties.
Radioactive contamination, also called radiological pollution, is the deposition of, or presence of radioactive substances on surfaces or within solids, liquids, or gases, where their presence is unintended or undesirable.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in New Mexico, US, is the world's third deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. The storage rooms at the WIPP are 2,150 feet underground in a salt formation of the Delaware Basin. The waste is from the research and production of United States nuclear weapons only. The plant started operation in 1999, and the project is estimated to cost $19 billion in total.
High-level waste (HLW) is a type of nuclear waste created by the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. It exists in two main forms:
Saltcrete is a mixture of cement with salts and brine, usually originating from liquid waste treatment plants. Its role is to immobilize hazardous waste and in some cases lower-level radioactive waste in the form of solid material. It is a form of mixed waste.
A deep geological repository is a way of storing hazardous or radioactive waste within a stable geologic environment, typically 200–1,000 m deep. It entails a combination of waste form, waste package, engineered seals and geology that is suited to provide a high level of long-term isolation and containment without future maintenance. This will prevent any radioactive dangers. A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada and Germany. Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced.
EnergySolutions, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, is one of the largest processors of low level waste (LLW) in America, making it also one of the world's largest nuclear waste processors. It was formed in 2007 when Envirocare acquired three other nuclear waste disposal companies: Scientech D&D, BNG America, and Duratek.
Spent nuclear fuel, occasionally called used nuclear fuel, is nuclear fuel that has been irradiated in a nuclear reactor. It is no longer useful in sustaining a nuclear reaction in an ordinary thermal reactor and, depending on its point along the nuclear fuel cycle, it will have different isotopic constituents than when it started.
La Crosse Boiling Water Reactor (LACBWR) was a boiling water reactor (BWR) nuclear power plant located near La Crosse, Wisconsin in the small village of Genoa, in Vernon County, Wisconsin, approximately 17 miles south of La Crosse along the Mississippi River. It was located directly adjacent to the coal-fired Genoa Station #3. The site is owned and was operated by Dairyland Power Cooperative (Dairyland). Although the reactor has been demolished and decommissioned, spent nuclear fuel is still stored at the location.
Transuranic waste (TRU) is stated by U.S. regulations, and independent of state or origin, to be waste which has been contaminated with alpha emitting transuranic radionuclides possessing half-lives greater than 20 years and in concentrations greater than 100 nCi/g (3.7 MBq/kg).
Nuclear entombment is a method of nuclear decommissioning in which radioactive contaminants are encased in a structurally long-lived material, such as concrete. This prevents radioactive material and other contaminated substances from being exposed to human activity and the environment. Entombment is usually applied to nuclear reactors, but also some nuclear test sites. Nuclear entombment is the least used of three methods for decommissioning nuclear power plants, the others being dismantling and deferred dismantling. The use of nuclear entombment is more practical for larger nuclear power plants that are in need of both long and short term burials, as well as for power plants which seek to terminate their facility licenses. Entombment is used on a case-by-case basis because of its major commitment with years of surveillance and complexity until the radioactivity is no longer a major concern, permitting decommissioning and ultimate unrestricted release of the property. Considerations such as financial backing and the availability of technical know-how are also major factors.
Under United States environmental policy, hazardous waste is a waste that has the potential to:
Waste are unwanted or unusable materials. Waste is any substance discarded after primary use, or is worthless, defective and of no use. A by-product, by contrast is a joint product of relatively minor economic value. A waste product may become a by-product, joint product or resource through an invention that raises a waste product's value above zero.
Waste management laws govern the transport, treatment, storage, and disposal of all manner of waste, including municipal solid waste, hazardous waste, and nuclear waste, among many other types. Waste laws are generally designed to minimize or eliminate the uncontrolled dispersal of waste materials into the environment in a manner that may cause ecological or biological harm, and include laws designed to reduce the generation of waste and promote or mandate waste recycling. Regulatory efforts include identifying and categorizing waste types and mandating transport, treatment, storage, and disposal practices.
Waste Control Specialists LLC (WCS) is a treatment, storage, & disposal company dealing in radioactive, hazardous, and mixed wastes. Developed and controlled by Texas billionaire investor Harold Simmons until his death at the end of 2013, the company was founded in Dallas, Texas in 1989 as a landfill operator, and awarded a unique license for disposal of low level radioactive waste in 2009. Its main operations are in Andrews County, Texas.
Radioactive waste is generated from the nuclear weapons program, commercial nuclear power, medical applications, and corporate and university-based research programs. Some of the materials LLW consists of are: "gloves and other protective clothing, glass and plastic laboratory supplies, machine parts and tools, and disposable medical items that have come in contact with radioactive materials". Waste is generally categorized as high level waste (HLW) and low-level waste (LLW). LLW contains materials such as irradiated tools, lab clothing, ion exchanger resins, animal carcasses, and trash from defense, commercial nuclear power, medical, and research activities. These materials usually have radioactivity that have short half lives—from ranges of multiple days to several hundred years. In 1990, 1.1 million cubic feet of LLW was produced. Currently, U.S. reactors generate about 40,000 cubic meters of low-level radioactive waste per year, including contaminated components and materials resulting from reactor decommissioning.
From 1946 through 1993, thirteen countries used ocean disposal or ocean dumping as a method to dispose of nuclear/radioactive waste with an approximation of 200,000 tons sourcing mainly from the medical, research and nuclear industry.
The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board was established in the 1987 Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act (NWPAA) to "...evaluate the technical and scientific validity of activities [related to managing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste] undertaken by the Secretary [of Energy], including
- site characterization activities; and
- activities relating to the packaging or transportation of high-level radioactive waste or spent nuclear fuel."
The advanced reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel is a potential key to achieve a sustainable nuclear fuel cycle and to tackle the heavy burden of nuclear waste management. In particular, the development of such advanced reprocessing systems may save natural resources, reduce waste inventory and enhance the public acceptance of nuclear energy. This strategy relies on the recycling of major actinides and the transmutation of minor actinides in appropriate reactors. In order to fulfill this objective, selective extracting agents need to be designed and developed by investigating their complexation mechanism.
