Download or read book A Risk based Focused Decision management Approach for Justifying Characterization of Hanford Tank Waste written by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Risk based Focused Decision management Approach for Justifying Characterization of Hanford Tank Waste June 1996 Revision 1 April 1997 Revision 2 written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report describes a disciplined, risk-based decision-making approach for determining characterization needs and resolving safety issues during the storage and remediation of radioactive waste stored in Hanford tanks. The strategy recommended uses interactive problem evaluation and decision analysis methods commonly used in industry to solve problems under conditions of uncertainty (i.e., lack of perfect knowledge). It acknowledges that problem resolution comes through both the application of high-quality science and human decisions based upon preferences and sometimes hard-to-compare choices. It recognizes that to firmly resolve a safety problem, the controlling waste characteristics and chemical phenomena must be measurable or estimated to an acceptable level of confidence tailored to the decision being made.
Download or read book An End State Methodology for Identifying Technology Needs for Environmental Management with an Example from the Hanford Site Tanks written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1999-03-16 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major issue in the cleanup of this country's nuclear weapons complex is how to dispose of the radioactive waste resulting primarily from the chemical processing operations for the recovery of plutonium and other defense strategic nuclear materials. The wastes are stored in hundreds of large underground tanks at four U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sites throughout the United States. The tanks contain hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of radioactive and hazardous waste. Most of it is high-level waste (HLW), some of it is transuranic (TRU) or low- level waste (LLW), and essentially all containing significant amounts of chemicals deemed hazardous. Of the 278 tanks involved, about 70 are known or assumed to have leaked some of their contents to the environment. The remediation of the tanks and their contents requires the development of new technologies to enable cleanup and minimize costs while meeting various health, safety, and environmental objectives. While DOE has a process based on stakeholder participation for screening and formulating technology needs, it lacks transparency (in terms of being apparent to all concerned decision makers and other interested parties) and a systematic basis (in terms of identifying end states for the contaminants and developing pathways to these states from the present conditions). An End State Methodology for Identifying Technology Needs for Environmental Management, with an Example from the Hanford Site Tanks describes an approach for identifying technology development needs that is both systematic and transparent to enhance the cleanup and remediation of the tank contents and their sites. The authoring committee believes that the recommended end state based approach can be applied to DOE waste management in general, not just to waste in tanks. The approach is illustrated through an example based on the tanks at the DOE Hanford Site in southeastern Washington state, the location of some 60 percent by volume of the tank waste residues.
Download or read book Science and Technology for Disposal of Radioactive Tank Wastes written by Wallace W. Shulz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radioactive wastes resulting from over 40 years of production of nuclear weapons in the U. S. are currently stored in 273 underground tanks at the U. S. Department of Energy Hanford site, Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, Oak Ridge Reservation, and Savannah River site. Combined, tanks at these sjtes contain approximately 94,000,000 gallons of waste in a variety of forms including liquid, concrete-like salt cake, and various sludges. More than 730,000,000 curies of several radioactive isotopes are present in the underground tanks. Certainly, one of the greatest challenges facing the U. S. Department of Energy is how to characterize, retrieve, treat, and immobilize the great variety of tank wastes in a safe, timely, and cost-effective manner. For several years now, the U. S. Department of Energy has initiated and sponsored scientific and engineering studies, tests, and demonstrations to develop the myriad of technologies required to dispose of the radioactive tank wastes. In recent times, much of the Department of Energy R&D activities concerning tank wastes have been closely coordinated and organized through the Tanks Focus Area (IF A); responsibility for technical operations of the TF A has been assigned to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Download or read book Nuclear Waste written by Gene Aloise and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Dept. of Energy (DoE) manages more than 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste stored in 177 underground tanks at its Hanford Site in Wash. State. Many of these aging tanks have already leaked waste into the soil. Meanwhile, DoE¿s planned process for emptying the tanks and treating the waste has experienced delays, lengthening the time the tanks will store waste and intensifying concerns about the tanks¿ viability during a long cleanup process. This report addresses: (1) the condition, contents, and long-term viability of Hanford¿s underground tanks; (2) DoE¿s strategy for managing the tanks; and (3) the extent to which DoE has weighed the risks and benefits of its tank mgmt. strategy against the growing costs of that strategy. Illustrations.
Download or read book Transactions of the American Nuclear Society written by American Nuclear Society and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 922 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hanford written by R. E. Gephart and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hanford: A Conversation About Nuclear Waste and Cleanup, Roy Gephart takes us on a journey through a world of facts, values, conflicts, and choices facing the most complex environmental cleanup project in the United States: the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Site. Starting with the top-secret Manhattan Project, Hanford was used to create tons of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hundreds of tons of waste and millions of curies remain. In an easy-to-read, illustrated text, Gephart crafts the story of Hanford becoming the world's first nuclear weapons site to release large amounts of contaminants into the environment. This was at a time when radiation biology was in its infancy, industry practiced unbridled waste dumping, and the public trusted what it was told. Hanford history reveals how little we sometimes understand events when caught inside of them. The plutonium market stalled with the end of the Cold War. Public accountability and environmental compliance ushered in a new cleanup mission. Today, Hanford is driven by remediation choices whose outcomes remain uncertain. It's a story whose epilogue will be written by future generations. This book is an information resource, written for the general reader as well as the technically trained person. It provides an overview of Hanford and cleanup issues facing the nuclear weapons complex. Each chapter is a topical mini-series. It's an idea guide that encourages readers to be informed consumers of Hanford news, and to recognize that knowledge, high ethical standards, and social values are at the heart of coping with nuclear waste. Hanford history is a window into many environmental conflicts facing our nation; it's about building uponsuccess and learning from failure. And therein lies a key lesson: when powerful interests are involved, no generation is above pretense.
Download or read book The Office of Environmental Management Technical Reports A Bibliography written by and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Office of Environmental Management's (EM) technical reports bibliography is an annual publication that contains information on scientific and technical reports sponsored by the Office of Environmental Management added to the Energy Science and Technology Database from July 1, 1994 through June 30, 1995. This information is divided into the following categories: Focus Areas, Cross-Cutting Programs, and Support Programs. In addition, a category for general information is included. EM's Office of Science and Technology sponsors this bibliography.
Download or read book Vadose Zone Science and Technology Solutions written by Brian B. Looney and published by Collector Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CD contains the entire text of the book plus additional case studies.
Download or read book Integrating Risk Analyses and Tools at the U S Department of Energy Hanford Site written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Risk assessment and environmental impact analysis at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Hanford Site in Washington State has made significant progress in refining the strategy for using risk analysis to support closing of several hundred waste sites plus 149 single-shell tanks at the Hanford Site. A Single-Shell Tank System Closure Work Plan outlines the current basis for closing the single-shell tank systems. An analogous site approach has been developed to address closure of aggregated groups of similar waste sites. Because of the complexity, decision time frames, proximity of non-tank farm waste sites to tank farms, scale, and regulatory considerations, various projects are providing integrated assessments to support risk analyses and decision-making. This paper will describe the approach for using risk assessment to support waste site and tank closure decisions, the tools being developed, and how integration of these risk assessments and analyses are being performed to ad dress near-term and longterm decisions.
Download or read book Characterization Strategy Report for the Organic Safety Issues written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report describes a logical approach to resolving potential safety issues resulting from the presence of organic components in hanford tank wastes. The approach uses a structured logic diagram (SLD) to provide a pathway for quantifying organic safety issue risk. The scope of the report is limited to selected organics (i.e., solvents and complexants) that were added to the tanks and their degradation products. The greatest concern is the potential exothermic reactions that can occur between these components and oxidants, such as sodium nitrate, that are present in the waste tanks. The organic safety issue is described in a conceptual model that depicts key modes of failure-event reaction processes in tank systems and phase domains (domains are regions of the tank that have similar contents) that are depicted with the SLD. Applying this approach to quantify risk requires knowing the composition and distribution of the organic and inorganic components to determine (1) how much energy the waste would release in the various domains, (2) the toxicity of the region associated with a disruptive event, and (3) the probability of an initiating reaction. Five different characterization options are described, each providing a different level of quality in calculating the risks involved with organic safety issues. Recommendations include processing existing data through the SLD to estimate risk, developing models needed to link more complex characterization information for the purpose of estimating risk, and examining correlations between the characterization approaches for optimizing information quality while minimizing cost in estimating risk.
Download or read book Risk based Systems Analysis for Emerging Technologies written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The risk-based systems analysis model was designed to establish funding priorities among competing technologies for tank waste remediation. The model addresses a gap in the Department of Energy's (DOE's) ''toolkit'' for establishing funding priorities among emerging technologies by providing disciplined risk and cost assessments of candidate technologies within the context of a complete remediation system. The model is comprised of a risk and cost assessment and a decision interface. The former assesses the potential reductions in risk and cost offered by new technology relative to the baseline risk and cost of an entire system. The latter places this critical information in context of other values articulated by decision makers and stakeholders in the DOE system. The risk assessment portion of the model is demonstrated for two candidate technologies for tank waste retrieval (arm-based mechanical retrieval -- the ''long reach arm'') and subsurface barriers (close-coupled chemical barriers). Relative changes from the base case in cost and risk are presented for these two technologies to illustrate how the model works. The model and associated software build on previous work performed for DOE's Office of Technology Development and the former Underground Storage Tank Integrated Demonstration, and complement a decision making tool presented at Waste Management 1994 for integrating technical judgements and non-technical (stakeholder) values when making technology funding decisions.
Download or read book Application of the Risk based Strategy to the Hanford Tank Waste Organic nitrate Safety Issue written by Valeria L. Hunter and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Strategic Analysis Study based Approach to Integrated Risk Assessment written by and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The goal of environmental restoration and waste management activities is to reduce public health risks or to delay risks to the future when new technology will be available for improved cleanup solutions. Actions to remediate the wastes on the Hanford Site will entail risks to workers, the public, and the environment that do not currently exist. In some circumstances, remediation activities will create new exposure pathways that are not present without cleanup activities. In addition, cleanup actions will redistribute existing health risks over time and space, and will likely shift health risks to cleanup workers in the short term. This report describes an approach to occupational risk assessment based on the Hanford Strategic Analysis Study and illustrates the approach by comparing worker risks for two options for remediation of N/K fuels, a subcategory of unprocessed irradiated fuels at Hanford.
Download or read book Systems Analysis and Systems Engineering in Environmental Remediation Programs at the Department of Energy Hanford Site written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1998-08-21 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The primary purpose of systems engineering is to organize information and knowledge to assist those who manage, direct, and control the planning, development, production, and operation of the systems necessary to accomplish a given mission. However, this purpose can be compromised or defeated if information production and organization becomes an end unto itself. Systems engineering was developed to help resolve the engineering problems that are encountered when attempting to develop and implement large and complex engineering projects. It depends upon integrated program planning and development, disciplined and consistent allocation and control of design and development requirements and functions, and systems analysis. The key thesis of this report is that proper application of systems analysis and systems engineering will improve the management of tank wastes at the Hanford Site significantly, thereby leading to reduced life cycle costs for remediation and more effective risk reduction. The committee recognizes that evidence for cost savings from application of systems engineering has not been demonstrated yet.
Download or read book Strategy and Methodology for Radioactive Waste Characterization written by International Atomic Energy Agency and published by IAEA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past decade significant progress has been achieved in the development of waste characterization and control procedures and equipment as a direct response to ever-increasing requirements for quality and reliability of information on waste characteristics. Failure in control procedures at any step can have important, adverse consequences and may result in producing waste packages which are not compliant with the waste acceptance criteria for disposal, thereby adversely impacting the repository. The information and guidance included in this publication corresponds to recent achievements and reflects the optimum approaches, thereby reducing the potential for error and enhancing the quality of the end product. -- Publisher's description.
Download or read book Framework for environmental health risk management written by United States. Presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
