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

3.3
The Interagency Review Group (IRG) on Nuclear Waste Management in its report of
March 1979, identified a number of alternative technical strategies, the environmental
impacts of which are encompassed in the analyses contained in this Statement. The IRG
Report recommended after considerable study and public input that:
* The approach to permanent disposal of nuclear waste should proceed in a stepwise
basis in a technically conservative manner.
* Near-term program activities should be predicated on the tentative assumption
that the first disposal facilities will be mined repositories, though nearer-term
alternative approaches--subseabed and very deep hole disposal--should be given
funding support.
* A number of potential sites in a variety of geologic environments should be iden-
tified, and action taken to reserve the option to use them if needed. Within
technical constraints, actions should be taken to have several repositories opera-
tional before the end of the century in different regions of the country.
Beyond these recommendations, the IRG defined four alternative strategies for the
development of repositories:
1. Strategy I provides that only mined repositories be considered for the first sev-
eral repositories and that only geological environments with salt as the emplace-
ment media would be considered for the first several repositories. As a result
of past programs, a large body of information about salt as an emplacement medium
exists. Thus, salt would be a probable choice for these repositories, since the
speed of implementation of this strategy would likely rule out other media.
2. Strategy II is similar to the first, except that a choice of site for the first
repository would be made from among whatever types of environments have been ade-
quately characterized at the time of choice. However the first choice would still
likely be from environments based on salt geology.
3. Strategy III provides that, for the first facility only mined repositories would
be considered. However, three to five geological environments possessing a wide
variety of emplacement media would be examined before a selection was made. Other
technological options would be contenders as soon as they had been shown to be
technologically sound and economically feasible.
4. Strategy IV provides that the choice of technical option and, if appropriate,
geological environment be made only after information about a number of environ-
ments and other technical options has been obtained.
These strategies are associated with different amounts of time needed to achieve an.opera-
tional repository, with Strategy I requiring the least amount of time and Strategy IV
requiring the most time.
DOE, on the basis of the input from many sources, has formulated a proposed research,
development and construction program for mined geologic repositories that incorporates the