Low-level waste includes lightly contaminated hospital gloves and gowns, but also includes more radioactive refuse, such as nuclear reactor parts.
Shinko Mimura to agree to a plan to store the
low-level waste at Japan Nuclear Fuel's facility in Aomori Prefecture.
If
low-level waste is discovered it will be taken to Drigg, near Sellafield.
The DOE is ahead of schedule on packaging nuclear materials for disposal, disposing of
low-level waste, and removing buildings, but lags on the tougher and costlier tasks of disposing of transuranic and radioactive tank wastes and closing tanks that contained radioactive waste.
And it's disgracefully misleading in claiming the radioactivity decays to give '
low-level waste' within 100 years.
Each can compact hazardous waste and/or
low-level waste within 55- or 85-gallon drums.
Thus little distinction may be made between a
low-level waste facility and a high-level waste store.
The quantity of solid radioactive waste generated by the various workshops is in the order of 70 tonnes a year, all of which is
low-level waste.The reference accident used to evaluate the potential radiological consequences of unplanned releases is an explosion of a reduction furnace in the workshop for producing uranium tetrafluoride at the Comurhex plant, involving emission of the total uranium inventory in the furnace.
Inert coolant gas minimizes
low-level waste by reducing equipment contamination.
Last Christmas it emerged
low-level waste containers from Dounreay had been 'recycled' and were being used to make a Santa's Grotto for local children
"It must be
low-level waste, or incineration would be the worst thing you could do," he said.
"We just don't keep that kind of data," says Bob Nelson, chief of the
low-level waste and regulation issues section in the NRC's Division of Waste Management.