PHOENIX, Ariz. — Staff at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects in the next couple months to issue their findings regarding potential updates to the regulatory approach for disposal of so-called very low-level radioactive waste.
The study initiated in 2016 considered a wide range of options, from maintaining the status quo to a full rulemaking to update federal regulations, NRC officials said Wednesday during a panel discussion at the 2019 Waste Management Symposia.
Along with rulemaking, staff also considered a significant guidance that would make the system more efficient or some smaller changes to the current process, according to Chris McKenney, chief of the NRC’s Risk and Technical Analysis Branch.
“That range of activities are evaluated in the information paper,” he said. “And, unfortunately, I’ll have to leave you wanting for the answer at this point.”
Very low-level waste (VLLW) is an informal designation for the least radioactive form of Class A radioactive waste as defined by the NRC – which is already the least-hazardous material with a formal classification and represents over 90 percent of all low-level radioactive waste. Today, VLLW can be disposed of in one of the licensed disposal sites for low-level waste or in hazardous or municipal landfills under federal regulations for alternative disposal.
The scoping study had multiple parts, including: coordinating with separate government agencies for consistent regulation of the material and defining the conditions under which VLLW could be shipped to Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Subtitle C hazardous waste sites. In taking stakeholder input last year, the NRC posed nine questions, including whether it should establish a specific regulatory definition for very low-level radioactive waste; whether there should be a new specific low-level waste category for VLLW; and whether categorization could produce “unintended consequences.”
