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

1.5
The President, in his February 12, 1980 message on radioactive wastes, called for waste
disposal facilities that could receive wastes from both the commercial nuclear power produc-
tion program and the national defense program. Since defense wastes are not explicitly
treated in this Statement, it is not intended to provide environmental input for disposal
decisions on defense wastes. However, in a generic sense, systems that can adequately dis-
pose of commercial radioactive wastes can reasonably be expected to adequately dispose of
defense wastes, since the processed wastes from the national defense program produce lower
temperatures and lower radiation intensities than do wastes from the same quantity of simi-
larly processed commercial fuel. Thus, assuming that other factors are equal, repository
loading criteria would generally be less stringent (in terms of quantities of waste per unit
area) for defense wastes than for commercial wastes. For this reason certain of the analyses
of impacts presented in this EIS should be of use in the preparation of EIS's on the long
term management of high-level and TRU defense waste.