Hazardous waste inventory, characteristics, generation, and facility assessment for treatment, storage, and disposal alternatives considered in the U.S. Department of Energy Waste Management Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement

Abstract

This report focuses on the generation of hazardous waste (HW) and the treatment of HW being generated by routine US Department of Energy (DOE) facility operations. The wastes to be considered are managed by the DOE Waste Management (WM) Division (WM HW). The waste streams are to be sent to WM operations throughout the DOE complex under four management alternatives: No Action, Decentralization, Regionalized 1, and Regionalized 2. On-site and off-site capabilities for treatment are examined for each alternative. This report (1) summarizes the HW inventories and generated amounts resulting from WM activities, focusing on the largest DOE HW generators; (2) presents estimates of the annual amounts shipped off-site, as well as the amounts treated by various treatment technology groups; (3) describes the existing and planned treatment and storage capabilities of the largest HW-generating DOE installations, as well as the use of commercial treatment facilities by DOE sites; (4) presents applicable technologies (destruction of organics, deactivation/neutralization of waste, removal/recovery of organics, and aqueous liquid treatment); and (5) describes the four alternatives for consideration for future HW management, and for each alternative provides the HW loads and the approach used to estimate the source term for routine treatment operations. In addition, potential air emissions, liquid effluents, and solid residuals associated with each alternative are presented. This report is supplemented with an addendum that includes detailed information related to HW inventory, characteristics, generation, and facility assessment for the treatment alternatives. The addendum also presents source terms, emission rates, and throughput totals by alternative and treatment installation.