long-lived radioactive material such as plutonium, technetium, and iodine. One such element, iodine-129, for instance, has a half-life of 15.8 million years (Lenssen 12). Although low-level wastes are less intense, they pose a significant hazard because they represent a far larger volume of waste.
By law, low-level nuclear wastes can be disposed of in landfills. Some states have designated specific disposal sites for such wastes. Since 1989, the United States has stored more than 76,000 cubic meters of military low-level waste and 46,000 cubic meters of civilian low-level waste in shallow trenches. About 73 percent of this volume of waste came from by-products and equipment from the nuclear power industry. About 2 percent of the volume came from medical waste (Lenssen 13).
A third category of radioactive waste is TRU (transuranic waste). TRU waste is plutonium contamination generated from the United State's bomb manufacture program. TRU waste shares characteristics of both high-level and low-level nuclear wastes. TRU elements have low-levels of radioactivity at long half-lives. For example, the radioisotope plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,400 years. The DOE has selected a site near Carlsbad, New Mexico to store barrels of accumulated TRU. The site, called the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant), is a source of contention for environmental groups and other citizen activists.
Some of the opposition to nuclear waste storage is caused by confusion over the characteristics of these wastes. The critical features of nuclear waste are activity, volume and longevity: "The single best measure of a waste's hazard is its (radio)activity, not its volume or half-life" (Wheelwright 43). Thus low-level wastes, although existing in greater quantities or volume, have low activity and generally short half-lives. TRU is both low-volume and low-activity, but the danger lies in its long half-life. The relatively small volume...