Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel – Oddball Wastes from the Savannah River Site

Each Department of Energy site has a cache of transuranic waste as a legacy of Cold War weapons production, and the Savannah River Site is no exception. Since 2000 a team of specialists has been characterizing this waste, container by container, and the project is nearly completed. To date, approximately 51,600 items have been analyzed, and most of the ones remaining are those that present special nondestructive assay measurement challenges for one reason or another. Some of these challenges include high activity waste, high minimum detectable activities, 237Np or 137Cs interference, distorted spectral peaks, inadequate site waste generator knowledge, and correction of errors from previous assays. To meet these challenges, the team has implemented a broad spectrum of innovative technical approaches. This paper describes several of the more challenging waste streams, and discusses in detail how such wastes are analyzed.