This section gives an overview of waste associated with nuclear materials and naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM).
Nuclear materials
We estimate that Australia will produce about 20m3 of waste containing nuclear materials in the next several decades. Australia already has 230m3 in storage.
These are raw waste volumes, without consideration of further conditioning or packaging that disposal may require. This is different to the 2021 inventory, where the reported volumes were estimated packaged waste volumes.
The inventory supports planning for future disposal. The conditioning and packaging of nuclear materials are not yet determined.
One waste stream, from nuclear medicine production, is the predominant source of the total activity of waste containing nuclear materials. This will have a total activity around 1022 Bq for existing and anticipated future waste combined.
Most of this radioactivity is attributable to short-lived decay products, which means it will decline rapidly in proportion to its time in storage. For this reason, we also expect the radioactivity to change with time.
Naturally occurring radioactive materials
The total waste volume associated with NORM reported to ARWA is small and so we have not included it in this report. We did not seek information about bulk volumes of NORM waste (like mine tailings or contaminated byproducts from oil and gas production) generated by the private sector and regulated by states and territories for this report because there are separate, established management approaches for such waste.