Abstract
A generic probabilistic risk assessment is developed for buried low-level radioactive waste from nuclear power production. Transfer probabilities from the ground to human ingestion are estimated from geochemical analogues, with justifications based on requirements of the regulations of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and comparisons of dietary intakes of various elements with their measured concentration ratios from soil to vegetation. These are combined with dose conversion factors from ICRP-30, risk estimates from BEIR-III, and recent elaborate estimates of waste quantities expected from the nuclear industry to give an estimate of 4 × 10 −4 deaths/GWe-yr among the public from buried low level waste integrated over all future time. This result is more probably an over-estimate than an under-estimate of the actual health effects.
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