Nuclear Decommissioning Technologies with Cost, Safety, and Schedule Benefits

摘要

On September 30, 2002, the Deactivation and Decommissioning Focus Area (DDFA) at the DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory concluded its mission to develop, demonstrate, and deploy improved technologies to decontaminate and decommission (D&D) DOE's surplus, radioactively contaminated facilities. Over the past seven years, over one hundred of the DDFA's technologies have been deployed nearly 400 times in deactivation or decommissioning projects in the DOE complex. Deployment of these technologies has improved the approach to deactivate or decommission these DOE facilities through cost savings, schedule acceleration, enhanced worker safety, reduced radiation dose, waste minimization, and reducing or eliminating adverse impacts to the environment. Some of these technologies provide benefit through only one of these factors, while other technologies provide multiple benefits (e.g. schedule acceleration usually results in cost savings). The technologies have spanned the entire range of D&D functions including characterization, decontamination, dismantlement and demolition, worker safety, robotics, and waste management. This summary will categorize and describe selected technologies according to their primary benefit recognizing that many technologies also have secondary benefits.