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

6.55
* Development of criteria for and categorization of siting opportunities
* Risk assessment.
Implementation Time and R&D Costs
The time to complete the R&D, and the associated costs would be very similar to time and
costs for a mined geologic repository. Increased R&D cost for the island concept would be
expected to be a very small increment when compared to total costs for development of the
mined geologic repository.
Summary
Major uncertainties, shortcomings, and advantages of the concept are summarized below:
* The transportation requirements to a remote location add to the overall risk of the
concept.
* The state of knowledge relating to the hydrologic regime, upon which the concept relies,
is not currently sufficient for siting or performance analysis.
* Considerable effort might be required to develop specialized waste forms and packages,
if current reference concepts are not suitable.
* The approach does appear to be technically conservative if the hydrology is as predicted
and to be capable of implementation in a step-wise manner.
* The concept employs the multi-barrier approach and has the additional attractive benefit
of being remote.
6.1.3.4 Impacts of Construction and Operation (Preemplacement)
Impacts of construction and operation of predisposal systems in the island concept would
be similar to those discussed in Section 5.6 for the mined geologic repository. Additional
impacts from the sea transportation link and the port facilities would also be involved and
are discussed in Section 6.1.4.4 for the subseabed disposal option. Impacts of mainland dis-
posal are not discussed here.
Ideally, any island chosen for disposal would be totally uninhabited prior to construc-
tion of the repository (Selvaduray et al. 1979). In this case, the only non-occupational
people impacted by construction and operation of the island repository would be families of
those working at the facility.
Health Impacts
Radiological Impacts. Increased radiation exposure of occupational personnel under both
normal and abnormal conditions would result from unloading of the waste at the receiving
port, temporary storage of the waste, and transfer of the waste to the repository. Quantita-
tive estimates of these exposures are not available at this time. However, unloading of the
waste would probably result in exposures similar to those encountered during loading at the
embarkation port, as discussed in Section 6.1.4.4 for the subseabed option. In addition, it
is significant that the island repository would accept TRU wastes. This means .that transpor-
tation impacts would be slightly greater than those for the subseabed option.