Federal law requires low-level wastes to be contained for up to 500 years.

The future of the low-level wastes is hardly simpler.

The National Governors Association has proposed the formation of six regional associations to deal with low-level wastes.

About 30 percent of low-level wastes are the contaminated containers, plastics and radioactive sources used by medical researchers and manufacturers.

Liquid low-level wastes were released in the open Barents and Kara Seas.

Low-level wastes include paper, rags, tools, clothing, filters, and other materials which contain small amounts of mostly short-lived radioactivity.

Low-level wastes from the Northeast and elsewhere used to be shipped to Barnwell, S.C.

It appears that in most cases shallow geological strata were used for low-level wastes and deeper strata for stronger ones, some of which are exceedingly hot.

The commission has argued that many of the low-level wastes now requiring special treatment emit such a low dosage of radiation that they do not pose a health concern.

The proposed deal involves low-level wastes, such as power-plant equipment that has become radioactive, and not spent nuclear fuel rods that could possibly be reprocessed into bomb-grade materials.

But if it is not built, it would be a serious setback for years of efforts by Congress to force states to cooperate in finding dumps for the low-level wastes from nuclear power plants, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies.

For low-level wastes - as opposed to the high-level spent fuel that the department wants to bury at Yucca - the Energy Department is trying a new material, a polymer foam that its manufacturer believes will bind up radioactive materials indefinitely.

The only dumps now licensed to receive low-level wastes are in Hanford, Wash., Beatty, Nev., and Barnwell, S.C. Under pressure from their three home states, Congress enacted the Low Level Radioactive Waste Policy Act of 1980.

Russia's Environment Minister, Viktor Danilov-Danilyan, said this month that while his Government supports the idea of a total legal prohibition, it lacks the money and technical expertise to build enough land-based storage sites for its low-level wastes and will probably have to resume ocean dumping of those materials by 1995.