This study was prepared by the Department in fulfillment of a congressional mandate specified in Public Law 102-579, referred to as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Land Withdrawal Act . The WIPP is required to meet the statutory requirements of Public Law 96-164. TRU waste is classified according to the radiation dose rate at a package surface.
Alpha radiation is the primary factor in the radiation health hazard associated with TRU waste.
At the time of burial, the DOE did not intend to retrieve that waste. About 55 percent of the Department's current TRU waste inventory contains hazardous substances regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. The fraction of TRU waste streams that contains hazardous substances is expected to decrease in the future due to DOE pollution prevention activities. Although the DOE is now conducting experiments in laboratories, at the time the LWA was passed, DOE planned on performing experiments with TRU waste in excavated rooms in the WIPP underground. The LWA limited experiments in the underground to those with small quantities of CH-TRU waste during the planned test phase.