A Generic Hazard Evaluation of Low-Level Waste Burial Grounds

The hazards from buried low-level radioactive waste are generically evaluated under conservative assumptions. It is assumed that transport mechanisms disperse the material randomly through the soil at an early time, thus bypassing all questions of transport through soil, hydrology, holdup processes, etc. in conventional evaluations. The transfer rate from soil to human ingestion is taken to be equal to that rate for naturally occurring isotopes of the same element, obtained from the daily ingestion intakes of Reference Man and geochemical abundances in sediments. Data are converted into the expected number of cancers by use of the BEIR report. The inhalation pathway is treated by assuming the composition of airborne dust to be the same as that of the soil, including the randomly dispersed radioactive material. The effects of a possible release into rivers are estimated by assuming that the probability of radioactive material getting into drinking water is equal to that for other materials in rivers. When the results are applied to the inventory at the Maxey Flats burial ground and reasonable assumptions are made about poorly identified materials, it is found that the total number of eventual cancers expected over the next 10 million years is less than one.