Potential waste-clearance strategy for U.S. Department of Energy waste processed at treatment, storage, and disposal facilities
- Dept. of Energy, Germantown, MD (United States). Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management
- Argonne National Lab., IL (United States); and others
Past practices at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) field facilities may have resulted in the presence of minute amounts of radioactive contamination in some hazardous wastes shipped from these facilities. In May 1991, the DOE Office of Waste Operations issued a nationwide moratorium on shipping potentially mixed waste from DOE facilities to commercial treatment, storage, and disposal (TSD) facilities. A potential waste-clearance strategy was developed to address the DOE mixed-waste moratorium issues, which had resulted from a lack of existing regulations regarding volume contamination. A radiological assessment model was developed on the basis of the detailed radiological assessment performed for eight commercial hazardous waste TSD facilities. The model incorporates waste- and site-specific data to estimate potential radiological doses to on-site workers and the off-site public from waste-handling operations at a TSD facility. The described waste-clearance strategy would provide both DOE and commercial TSD facilities with a rapid and cost-effective methodology for assessing potential human exposures from the processing of chemical wastes contaminated with trace amounts of radionuclides. This strategy also has important potential applications for establishing site clearance limits to ensure that worker and public risks would remain well below regulatory limits. The clearance strategy issues pertaining to current free-release practice, dose limits, data requirements, and conservatism are discussed.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-31109-ENG-38
- OSTI ID:
- 204232
- Report Number(s):
- ANL/EA/CP-87799; CONF-960212-40; ON: DE96006730; TRN: 96:008771
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Waste management `96: HLW, LLW, mixed wastes and environmental restoration - working towards a cleaner environment, Tucson, AZ (United States), 25-29 Feb 1996; Other Information: PBD: 1996
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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