FINAL ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STATEMENT Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Volume 2 of 2

This document provides environmental input for certain decisions in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) program for managing the transuranic radio-active waste generated in the national defense program. This final environ-mental impact statement was preceded by a draft statement published by the DOE in April 1979. Large quantities of radioactive waste have resulted from the production of nuclear weapons and the operation of military reactors in national defense programs. This waste includes both high-level waste (HLW) and transuranic (TRU) waste. (These terms are defined in the main text of this document and in the glossary.) The earliest decision on managing these wastes was made in the mid-1940s: to store high-level waste as liquids in tanks and to bury other waste in trenches. In the mid-1950s, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences suggested salt formations for the permanent disposal of high-level waste. Studies of salt, including experiments in a salt mine in central Kan-sas, led to a 1970 proposal to establish a high-level-waste repository in that mine; this proposal, however, foundered for a variety of technical reasons.