Re: Charge for waste disposal

["Sue M. Dupre" <dupre@arundel.Princeton.EDU>]

Sim,

We have always charged back our users for the direct costs of 
radioactive waste disposal, i.e., any cost that our waste disposal 
broker charges us gets charged back, but costs for our time and labor 
are not charged back.  Actually my office charges the users' 
departments and then it's up to each department to figure out how to 
charge the users within that department.  Most of the departments keep 
track of which users have put waste in a given drum and how many bags 
of waste went into the drum, so that when a department charges its 
users, it figures the user's cost based proportionally on volume.

We haven't had any problems with this system in the past but I do 
have a concern now. We only ship out long-lived waste and 
scintillation vial waste.  Since it takes a long time these days to 
accumulate sufficient wastes for a shipment, it is possible that a 
user might leave before he/she can be charged back for the waste or 
the user may neglect to budget for waste disposal because he/she sees 
a bill so rarely.

The University's decay-in-storage facility, which is not operated by 
my office, charges its users a minimal fee for direct costs of 
supplies.

Please let me know if I can be of further help.



Sue M. Dupre, Health Physicist

Office of Occupational Health and Safety       
Chemical Sciences Building/Forrestal Campus    
Princeton University                           
Princeton, NJ  08544-0710

E-mail: dupre@princeton.edu
Phone:  (609) 258-6252
Fax:    (609) 258-1804

Visit the OHS Web site at http://www.princeton.edu/~ehs