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Published: 1983

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Nuclear wastes from the defense production cycle contain many uniquely useful, intrinsically valuable, and strategically important materials. These materials have a wide range of known and potential applications in food technology, agriculture, energy, public health, medicine, industrial technology, and national security. Furthermore, their removal from the nuclear waste stream can facilitate waste management and yield economic, safety, and environmental advantages in the management and disposal of the residual nuclear wastes that have no redemptive value. This document is the program plan for implementing the recovery and beneficial use of these valuable materials. An Executive Summary of this document, DOE/DP-0013, Vol. 1, January 1983, is available. Program policy, goals and strategy are stated in Section 2. Implementation tasks, schedule and funding are detailed in Section 3. The remaining five sections and the appendixes provide necessary background information to support these two sections. Section 4 reviews some of the unique properties of the individual byproduct materials and describes both demonstrated and potential applications. The amounts of byproduct materials that are available now for research and demonstration purposes, and the amounts that could be recovered in the future for expanded applications are detailed in Section 5. Section 6 describes the effects byproduct recovery and utilization have on the management and final disposal of nuclear wastes. The institutional issues that affect the recovery, processing and utilization of nuclear byproducts are discussed in Section 7. Finally, Section 8 presents a generalized mathematical process by which applications can be evaluated and prioritized (rank-ordered) to provide planning data for program management.