Land Disposal Restrictions: National Treatment Variance To Designate New Treatment Subcategories for Radioactively Contaminated Cadmium-, Mercury-, and Silver-Containing Batteries

EPA is taking direct final action to grant a national treatability variance from the Land Disposal Restrictions (LDR) treatment standards for radioactively contaminated cadmium-, mercury-, and silver-containing batteries by designating new treatment subcategories for these wastes in response to a rulemaking petition from the Department of Energy. The current treatment standards of thermal recovery for cadmium batteries and of roasting and retorting for mercury batteries are technically inappropriate, because any recovered metals would likely contain residual radioactive contamination and not be usable. The current numerical treatment standard for silver batteries is also inappropriate because of the potential increase in radiation exposure to workers associated with manually segregating silver-containing batteries for the purpose of treatment. Macroencapsulation in accordance with the provisions for treatment standards for hazardous debris is designated as the required treatment prior to land disposal for the new waste subcategories. This will allow safe disposal of these radioactively contaminated materials.