Encyclopedia of Global Resources part 92 provides a wide variety of perspectives on both traditional and more recent views of Earth's resources. It serves as a bridge connecting the domains of resource exploitation, environmentalism, geology, and biology, and it explains their interrelationships in terms that students and other nonspecialists can understand. The articles in this set are extremely diverse, with articles covering soil, fisheries, forests, aluminum, the Industrial Revolution, the . Department of the Interior, the hydrologic cycle, glass, and placer mineral deposits. . | 838 Nuclear waste and its disposal Global Resources the organization to ensure public health and safety but provides no specific guidance on how far the mandate must be pursued. NRC safety decisions have been criticized both by the nuclear industry and by environmental interests. The industry contends that NRC regulations have sometimes been unnecessary counterproductive and overly prescriptive in techniques for achieving safety. Environmental interests have asserted that the NRC has compromised safety to ensure the economic viability of nuclear projects. Safety concerns reached a peak when a reactor accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. In response to investigations of the accident the NRC reformed its licensing and regulatory processes. However no new plants were begun and a number of nuclear projects then in progress were canceled. William C. Wood Web Site . Nuclear Regulatory Commission http See also Atomic Energy Acts Atomic Energy Commission Energy economics Nuclear energy Nuclear waste and its disposal Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Nuclear waste and its disposal Category Pollution and waste disposal The disposal of radioactive waste is a significant problem for the nuclear power industry and society as a whole. Various methods of burying and destroying the material have been proposed. Background Unwanted radioactive materials are classified as low-level transuranic or high-level waste or spent nuclear fuel depending on the concentration of radioactivity and the half-life of the radioactive material. In some cases radioactive tailings from uranium mines are also of concern. Low-level waste LLW such as syringes contaminated by radioactive pharmaceuticals is much less dangerous than the high-level waste HLW or spent fuel rods generated by nuclear reactors. Trans uranic waste TRU is radioactive waste with a level of radioactivity greater than 100 nanocuries per gram a half-life greater than twenty
