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Commercial and Military Nuclear Waste

The data on significant portions of nuclear waste are uncertain or unavailable. There are no reliable overall data on uranium mining waste, though fragmentary data indicate that the amounts are comparable to those of mill tailings in weight or volume. The radioactivity of reject ores and mine wastes per unit weight is generally considerably lower than that of mill tailings.

The uranium mining and milling wastes due to commercial nuclear power generation in the United States are far higher than those indicated in the table. That is because most uranium used in US nuclear power plants is imported (80 to 90 percent in recent years). The environmental impact of US nuclear power plants therefore extends considerably beyond its borders. Canada, Australia, and the countries of the former Soviet Union are the main suppliers to the United States.

Transuranic wastes are generated mainly in plutonium separation (reprocessing) as well as processing and fabrication of separated plutonium into nuclear weapons or commercial products. The transuranic wastes in the DOE are mainly from nuclear weapons production. However, some fraction of DOE high-level waste is due to the separation of plutonium-238 for commercial purposes (mostly NASA radioisotope thermal electricity generators). There are no data available for transuranic waste generated during the operation of the commercial reprocessing plant at West Valley, New York (1966-72).

Official data on TRU waste generated by nuclear weapons production are unreliable and internally contradictory. The DOE database shows that buried TRU waste has a total radioactivity greater than 0.14 million curies. However, the only technically reasonably survey of buried TRU wastes concluded that there are between 640,000 and 900,000 curies of radioactivity in TRU waste buried at Idaho alone. Hence the DOE's figure of greater than 0.14 million curies of radioactivity for buried TRU waste is utterly misleading. We have added a figure of 0.6 million curies for Idaho buried waste to the DOE figure of 2.6 million curies for retrievably stored TRU wastes to come up with the estimate of greater than 3 million curies (rounded to one significant digit).

NUCLEAR WASTE, 1996
Mininga
Milling
Low-level
TRU
High-level
Spent Fuel
Weight/volume:

nuclear weapons
~100 million MT
100 million MT
3 million m3
>200,000 m3
345,000 m3
2,483 MT
commercial
~130 millionb MT
130 millionb MT
1.8 million m3
not available
2,000 m3
34,300 MT
Radioactivity
(curies):

nuclear weapons
10,000c
100,000
>12.1 million
>3 milliond
880 million
not available
commercial
10,000c
~100,000
>5.1 million
not available
23.6 million
~30,000 million
Sources:
Military figures: Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit, (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), p. 375, Table 6-1.
Other data taken or estimated from Integrated Data Base: US Spent Fuel and Radioactive Waste Inventories, Projections, and Characteristics, DOE/RW-006 Rev.
12 and Rev. 13, Table 0.3; and Containing the Cold War Mess.
Notes:
  • Figures are rounded to the number of significant places implicit in each case.
  • The symbol ">" means "greater than".
  • MT = metric tons; m3 = cubic meters

a. Weight of mining waste assumed to be roughly equal to the weight of mill tailings.
b. Commercial mining and milling wastes are far more than indicated in the table. See text.
c. Mining waste specific activity assumed to be one-tenth that of milling waste.
d. For TRU waste, radioactivity figure combines the estimate of TRU radioactivity at the Idaho site plus the DOE estimate of retrievably stored waste.

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January 1999