Alternative proposal for the disposal of potentially contaminated railroad crossties at the Savannah River Site. Revision 1

摘要

The Savannah River Site (SRS) has accumulated approximately 300,000 crossties that have been replaced over a 40-year period of maintaining the site's 62 miles of railroad track. A small fraction of the ties are potentially contaminated with radioactivity as a result of past site practices and service. Contamination was possible from occasional leaks in transport-casks moved by rail from the site's five nuclear materials production reactors to its two reprocessing facilities. Casks typically were filled with spent fuel, targets, and water from the reactor disassembly basins, which contained small amounts of fission and neutron activation product radioactivity normal to the operation of nuclear reactors.