RESOLUTION OF NUCLEAR INVENTORY DISCREPANCIES DURING THE ARGONNE ALPHA GAMMA HOT CELL FACILITY DE-INVENTORY PROCESS

摘要

One of the major activities in the Nuclear Operations Deactivation Program at Argonne NationalLaboratory is preparing nuclear material for final disposition from the Argonne Alpha Gamma HotCell Facility (AGHCF), and shipping the material to either Idaho National Laboratory (INL) or tothe Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The AGHCF is a non-reactor nuclear facility that is beingtransitioned from a programmatic, research and development (R&D) mission to a radioactivematerial handling, management, storage, and disposition mission. In the course of this conversion,inventory discrepancies are occasionally discovered. These differences can be due, in part, to entryerrors, inconsistencies, or under-documentation in material databases. Another cause of differencescan be chemical or physical changes in the nuclear material itself (often decades old) due todegradation, decomposition, oxidation, morphology changes, fracture, abrasion, or othermechanisms. A small percentage of nuclear material can be, at least temporarily, unidentified,under-identified, or misidentified.1 This talk discusses some of the methods employed forreconciling and resolving inventory discrepancies, as well as some of those that have beensuggested during a January 2010 Workshop at Argonne sponsored by The Department of Energyand The Office of Health, Safety, and Security (DOE/HSS) on the analysis of nuclear inventorydiscrepancies.