Year
2002
Abstract
Hundreds of waste packages are generated each month at the Westinghouse Savannah River Site (SRS), Aiken, SC. Most of these waste packages are compactable, low level waste (LLW) either in 55-gallon drums or B-25 boxes, and TRU waste is put in DOT Type A 55-gallon drums. Several methods are used for assay of the waste package contents, including direct assay, dose-to-curie measurements, and smear-to-curie measurements. These assays generate many thousands of data that must be entered manually into the SRS Waste Information Tracking System (WITS) by a Generation Certification Official, even though much of this data is already available electronically. Since spreadsheets are routinely used to collect data for manual entry into WITS, direct data upload would greatly improve data entry. WITS was originally written as an interactive program, requiring each data item to be entered individually with subsequent tests being performed on each data entry to ensure that acceptance criteria were met. An error message was displayed if the acceptance criteria were not met, and either corrected data had to be re-entered or a deviation had to be approved by WITS personnel. This system did not allow batch data entry, where essentially all the data could be entered, and then all of this data were evaluated against the acceptance criteria.