In several countries, low-level radioactive wastes are treated and stored awaiting construction and operation of a final repository. In some cases, interim storage may be extended for decades requiring special attention regarding security issues. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recommends segregation of wastes that may be exempted from interim storage or ultimate disposal. The pap...

The IAEA's Programme on BlOsphere Modelling and Assessment (BIOMASS) provided an international forum for information exchange, development and collaboration in the area of environmental assessment modelling. This paper contains a brief overview of the work and results of the three themes of BIOMASS, namely: radioactive waste disposal, environmental releases and biosphere processes. The BIOMASS ...

The EPA Regional Ground Water Forum is a group of EPA professionals representing Regional Superfund and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Offices, committed to the identification and resolution of ground-water issues impacting the remediation of Superfund and RCRA sites. The Forum is supported by and advises the Superfund Technical Support Project. Emerging technologies that could p...

Composting is a natural biological process which results in the degradation of organic waste to a stable end product, commonly referred to as compost, which can be utilized for various agricultural purposes. Increasing landfill costs and regulations which limit many types of waste accepted at landfills has increased interest in composting as a component of waste management (Goldstein and Spence...

The article argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the operational aspects of the U.S. radioactive waste management system when it grows to the scale necessary to handle wastes produced by a fully deployed plutonium economy. Without such information, many of the unsettling speculations which have become part of the public debate and are summarized herein cannot be clearly addressed...

The flow of fluids in complex geometries like porous media [1] plays an important role in a wide variety of technological and environmental processes including chromotography, oil recovery, the degradation of building materials and the spread of hazardous wastes in soils. The complexity of such flow processes makes their theoretical and experimental study a great challenge. Recent developments ...

The Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State is the location of the largest nuclear waste storage area in the United States. Since plutonium production facilities at Hanford were shut down in 1987,cleaning up the leftover waste at the Hanford Site has become one of the largest environmental cleanup projects in history. Legal, political, technical, and social aspects of the cleanup contribu...

The emerging interest in using stable bedrock formations for industrial purposes, e.g., nuclear waste disposal, has increased the need for understanding microbiological and geochemical processes in deep crystalline rock environments, including the carbon cycle. Considering the origin and evolution of life on Earth, these environments may also serve as windows to the past. Various geological, ch...

The production of pure deuterium and the removal of tritium from nuclear waste are the key challenges in separation of light isotopes. Presently, the technological methods are extremely energy- and cost-intensive. Here we report the capture of heavy hydrogen isotopes from hydrogen gas by selective adsorption at Cu(I) sites in a metal-organic framework. At the strongly binding Cu(I) sites (32 kJ...

Costs and benefits in the distant future—such as those associated with global warming, long-lived infrastructure, hazardous and radioactive waste, and biodiversity—often have little value today when measured with conventional discount rates. We demonstrate that when the future path of this conventional rate is uncertain and persistent (i.e., highly correlated over time), the distant future shou...