Year
2001
Abstract
The Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) at the Westinghouse Savannah River Site (SRS), Aiken, SC, produces about 4,000 cubic feet of assayed low-level and TRU waste each year. Most of this waste is packaged in 55-gallon drums, while less than 5% is packaged in B-25 containers. This waste is assayed with a Canberra Q2 waste monitor, located in the Solid Waste Assay Facility (SWAF), resulting in the analysis, verification and reporting of about 10,000 waste data each year. Canberra Q2 analysis software produces a summary of radioactivities for from ten to twenty nuclides for each waste assay. Data in each of these summaries has to be interpreted according to a data hierarchy, and then entered into Excel spreadsheets. The spreadsheets must be checked to ensure that no limits are exceeded, and the data and spreadsheet integrity must be verified to ensure that the data entry and calculations are correct. Also, data for some non-assayed waste from SRS Waste Management Group (WMG) calculations must be entered into the spreadsheets and included in the QA verifications. Doing thousands of entries and hundreds of spreadsheet verifications by hand is extremely time-consuming, tedious and prone to errors. A computer program, called SWAF Analysis and Report Automation (SWAFARA), was written in Visual Basic to automate the SWAF analysis and reporting of waste assay data. A special data dump was implemented to provide the analysis data in an ASCII format, and SRS network connections were installed in the SWAF. Therefore, analysis data is readily available to any computer that is on the network. A set of rules was developed to filter and recalculate data that are placed in the report spreadsheets. SWAFARA implements these rules, exports the data files to Excel, and verifies that the package limits are not exceeded. Nuclides not listed in the template spreadsheet are added on a case by case basis by the program, and WMG calculation data are automatically entered into the spreadsheet. By implementing the SWAFARA software, there has been a major reduction in labor needs and transcription errors have essentially been eliminated. Therefore, the whole process is now much less labor intensive, more cost effective, and more accurate. Also, this computer program can be modified to automate other applications on systems that use Canberra Genie analysis software.