ABSTRACT
The placement of facilities for the permanent disposal of municipal solid waste, hazardous chemical waste, and nuclear wastes alike has become an increasingly large part of waste management. The major categories of radioactive waste that exist are high-level waste, low-level waste, transuranic waste, uranium mine and mill tailings, mixed wastes, and naturally occurring radioactive materials. For the purposes of this chapter, the terms nuclear waste and radioactive waste will be considered synonymous. The object of waste disposal is to isolate the material from the biosphere, and in the case of radioactive waste allow it time to decay to sufficiently safe levels. A vast amount of quantitative dose-response data has been accumulated throughout years of studying the different applications of radionuclides. The following subsections will provide a brief description of the different types of ionizing radiation and the effects that may occur upon overexposure to radioactive materials.
