The Korean government has strived to secure a disposal site for the safe management of radioactive waste since the early 1980s. The 249 th meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) held in September 1998 established the “National Radioactive Waste Management Policy”, which aims at completing the construction of a Low and Intermediate Level Radioactive Waste (LILW) disposal facility by 2008,...

Background Environmental regulations on medical waste incineration have become more stringent at the same time as landfill capacities are diminishing in many parts of the country. These two circumstances are leading many healthcare facilities to reevaluate their medical waste generation and disposal practices. Although the typical healthcare waste stream can include infectious, radioactive, and...

Cleaning up and disposing of approximately 50 years of nuclear waste is the main mission at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, located in the southeastern part of the state of Washington. A major element of the total cleanup effort involves retrieving, processing, and disposing of radioactive and hazardous waste stored in 177 underground storage tanks. referred to as t...

14C is one of the limiting radionuclides used in the categorization of radioactive graphite waste; this categorization is crucial in selecting the appropriate graphite treatment/disposal method. We propose a rapid analysis method for 14C specific activity determination in small graphite samples in the 1-100 μg range. The method applies an oxidation procedure to the sample, which extracts 14C fr...

The radionuclide of uranium (U) is major radionuclide contained in the long life of high level radioactive liquid waste (HLLW) generated from reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. The radioactive waste have to be treated to ready for long term disposal. Separation of the U at high efficiencies greatly lowers the volume of the long life alpha radioactive waste to be disposed and decreases the haza...

Supercritical CO2 fluid leaching (SFL) method using supercritical CO2 fluid containing a complex of HNO3 tri-n-butyl phosphate (TBP) was applied to removal of uranium from radioactive solid wastes. Sea sands, incineration ashes and porous alumina bricks were employed as matrixes of simulated solid wastes. Real radioactive incineration ash wastes and firebrick wastes were also subjected to the S...

The soil solid-liquid distribution coefficient (Kd) value is of great significance in understanding and modelling the environmental behaviour of soil contaminants. For many years, the batch sorption technique has been used for the determination of such values. Here, we propose an alternative 'mini-column' approach in which somewhat more realistic soil conditions are maintained. In particular, t...

Swiss Legislation requires for all types of radioactive waste the safe and permanent disposal in deep geological repositories within Switzerland by stipulating a step-by-step procedure for site selection and licensing of the disposal facilities. Each step requires safety considerations or safety analyses which are reviewed by the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate. The principle steps of...

Non-elutable crystalline silicotitanate (CST) ionexchanger materials have been studied for removing cesium from a variety of radioactive wastes at several U.S. DOE sites over the last decade. For the current pretreatment facility design of the River Protection Project (RPP) Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) in Hanford, the removal of cesium from low activity waste (LAW) is achieved by ion-exchange te...