What Exactly is Low-Level Radioactive Waste?

In this morning's Indianapolis Star, an unsigned editorial comes to the conclusion that a shipment of low-level radioactive waste traveling through the area shouldn't be cause for alarm:

Shipments of radioactive waste that will be routed around I-465 en route to a disposal site in Texas are as welcome as a thunderstorm on the Fourth of July. But the 4,000 containers of low-level radioactive waste, moving via flatbed trucks across Indiana through the end of the year, are probably less dangerous than most chemicals routinely traversing Hoosier highways and railroads . . .

For the past two decades, thousands of truckloads of waste, along with more than 150 train trainloads of radioactive material, have been shipped through here from the Cincinnati facility without incident.

If a nuclear repository is created in Nevada, thousands of spent fuel rods likely will be shipped across Indiana from nuclear power plants in the eastern United States. It's something the state will have to deal with by virtue of its centralized location.

Nationwide, there have been 72 incidents involving spent nuclear fuel shipments over more than a half-century. None has resulted in serious contamination or injuries related to radiation exposure, according to U.S. Atomic Energy Commission reports.

Dealing with and minimizing the risk is the price of living in a post-industrial society and maintaining a viable national defense.

It's important to note that though the above editorial mentions two distinct types of materials -- both used nuclear fuel and low-level radioactive waste -- the materials that will actually be shipped through the Indianapolis area in this case are low-level radioactive waste.

Click here for NEI's archive on the topic, and a precise definition of the term:

Beneficial activities create low-level waste. Low-level waste is an unavoidable by-product of the beneficial uses of a wide range of radioactive materials. Many socially beneficial activities use radioactive materials and therefore produce low-level waste. These include electricity generation; diagnosis of illness without exploratory surgery; treatment of diseases like cancer; medical research; testing of new pharmaceuticals; nondestructive testing of pipes and welds; hardening of materials, like hardwood floors; breeding of new varieties of seed with higher crop yields; eradication of insect pests; production of ionization-type smoke detectors; and dozens of other purposes . . .

Items that become low-level waste. Low-level waste includes such items as gloves and other personal protective clothing, glass and plastic laboratory supplies, machine parts and tools, filters, wiping rags, and medical syringes that have come in contact with radioactive materials. Low-level waste from nuclear plants typically includes water purification filters and resins, tools, protective clothing, plant hardware and wastes from reactor cooling-water cleanup systems.

NRC classes of low-level waste. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations separate low-level waste into three classes: A, B, and C. The classification depends on the concentration, half-life and types of the various radionuclides it contains. The NRC sets requirements for packaging and disposal of each class of waste. Class A low-level waste contains radionuclides with the lowest concentrations and the shortest half-lives. About 95 percent of all low-level waste is categorized as Class A.

For our archive on the shipment of used nuclear fuel, click here. There, the record for safety is incredibly impressive:

Small amount of waste carefully managed. The high-level waste currently produced by all U.S. nuclear power plants as used fuel rods totals about 2000 tons per year. The United States produces a total of about 41 million tons of hazardous waste each year, 8 million tons of which is routinely transported around the country annually. All used nuclear fuel has been managed so that no adverse impacts to human health or the environment has occurred.

Record of safety. The nuclear energy industry has carried out more than 3000 shipments of used nuclear fuel over 1.7 million miles of U.S. highways and railroads since 1964. No nuclear fuel container has ever leaked or cracked in any way. In total, fuel containers were involved in just eight accidents, only four with fuel loaded in the container. The most serious was an overturned truck in 1971. No radiation was released in any of the accidents.

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