Management of Commercially Generated Radioactive Waste - U.S. ...

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4.7 ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF PREDISPOSAL OPERATIONS
Impacts of predisposal operations, including construction and decommissioning of waste
management facilities and transport casks, operation of waste management facilities, and
transportation of spent fuel and reprocessing wastes, are described here. Impacts consid-
ered include land, water and resource use, socioeconomic impacts, and radiological effects.
The sources of this information are DOE/ET-0028 and DOE/ET-0029, which may be consulted for
details.
The operational impacts discussed here are based on routine operations. Accidents and
their impacts are discussed in Section 4.8. Source terms for routine releases of radioac-
tive effluents do, however, include releases from minor accidents at reference facilities.
4.7.1 Environmental Impacts Related to Predisposal
Operations for the Once-Through Fuel Cycle
The predisposal operations in the example once-through fuel cycle of this Statement
include: 1) initial storage of unpackaged spent fuel in water basins either at the reactors
or in away-from-reactor storage facilities (AFRs), 2) transportation of spent fuel to the
disposal site (and between storage sites, if necessary), and 3) packaging of the spent fuel.
An additional operation, extended storage of packaged spent fuel, is also evaluated for pos-
sible use in case there is a long delay in repository availability. The impacts of con-
structing, operating, and decommissioning these facilities are covered in this
section.
The impacts of the fuel packaging facilities are included with those of the AFRs in
this section, as in DOE/ET-0029, even though the example case for this Statement assumes
that the fuel packaging facilities are located at the disposal sites. Fuel packaging facil-
ities might also be located at the extended storage facilities, if such storage is imple-
mented. The fuel packaging facility impacts would be essentially the same at any of the
three locations.
These predisposal operations assume that the spent fuel will be disposed in a mined
geologic repository within the continental U.S. The use of alternative disposal concepts
could alter the number and type of predisposal facilities required. The use of a concept
involving disposal outside the continental U.S. (i.e., island, subseabed, or ice sheet dis-
posal) requires the use of additional transportation facilities (i.e., ships and docking
facilities) and possible additional storage facilities. Use of the space disposal, rock
melting, or well injection concepts requires the use of processing plants to obtain suitable
waste forms. Impacts of such processing plants would be similar to those of a fuel repro-
cessing plant in the reprocessing cycle case.
4.7.1.1 Resource Commitments for Once-Through Fuel Cycle Waste Management
Land use commitments for a 3000 MTHM AFR with a fuel packaging facility are about
40 ha, of which 14 ha will be cleared for construction.