[en] The Department of Energy's (DOE's) strategy for the management of transuranic (TRU) and TRU mixed wastes has focused on the development of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The WIPP repository is designated to receive DOE defense wastes that meet the established criteria for acceptance. As a national strategy [DOE, 1993], DOE does not intend to treat candidate wastes unless treatment or processing are necessary to meet the safety, health, and regulatory criteria for transport and disposal at WIPP. The WIPP WAC has evolved over the past 10 years to include criteria and requirements in support of the Waste Characterization program and other related compliance programs. In aggregate, the final health, safety and regulatory criteria for the waste will be documented in the Disposal WAC. This document serves two purposes. First, it familiarizes regulators and stakeholders with the concept of performance based waste acceptance criteria as an augmentation within a final Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) Waste Acceptance Criteria. Second, the document preliminarily identifies certain waste characteristics that appear important to the performance assessment process for WIPP; therefore, these could become component characteristics in the Performance Based Waste Acceptance Criteria (PBWAC). Identification of the final PBWAC will be accomplished through iterative runs of the System Prioritization Method (SPM). These iterations will serve to more clearly isolate and identify those waste characteristics that directly and predominately impact on the performance assessment