Re: waste disposal charges

["Kenneth Douglass" <KDOUGLAS@WVUHSC1.HSC.WVU.EDU>]

Sue et al,

I am glad you brought this up since I am trying to revamp our waste 
charges.

Under our budget we are supposed to recover from users the 
cost of shipping radioactive waste. We impose a lab use fee, which is 
minimal and charge individual PIs for waste that we pick up. The 
current charges were inherited from the previous RSO and haven't been 
updated for aobut 6 years. They range from about $200 for a 55 gallon 
drum of LS vials to $700 for a drum of long halflife solids. We also 
have charged for short halflife waste, presumably to spread the costs 
to all users.

These charges definitely encourage hoarding of waste and other 
questionable practices.What we would do if housekeeping 
charged us $10 every time they emptied our wastebasket!

We have discussed a few options:

1) There should be no charge for decayable waste unless it can be 
linked to institutional charges for storage space, for example.

2) Charge each lab a flat fee each year, depending on the type of 
nuclide they use. For example, $1000 per year if they use H-3, $500 
if they just produce LS vials. This would place the charges on those 
labs producing waste, but remove the temptation to cheat on the 
amount.

3) Continue charging per waste picked up, but revise the charges to 
reflect current disposal costs. Thus a drum of long halflife solids 
might cost $1000 or more, short halflife nothing. This again places 
the cost with the waste producers, but can be difficult to figure 
because of the delay between pickup and shipment. We also compact 
waste, so the final volume will change, and waste from different PIs 
may be combined into one container.

4) I like the idea of charging the department rather than the 
investigator. Better yet would be including waste charges in 
university overhead (like housekeeping), but I don't see that 
happening here.

If researchers can include waste disposal costs in their grants, that 
is fine. I would rather see my role as facilitating research rather 
than impeding it by imposing extra costs to the researcher.

Thanks for the chance to express these thoughts!

Ken
Kenneth H. Douglass, Ph.D.
Director, Radiation Safety
West Virginia University
West Virginia University Hospitals
PO Box 9006
Morgantown WV 26506
(304) 293-1549
(304) 293-4529 (fax)
kdouglas@wvu.edu