RESOLUTION OF NUCLEAR INVENTORY DISCREPANCIES DURING THE ARGONNE ALPHA GAMMA HOT CELL FACILITY DE-INVENTORY PROCESS

One of the major activities in the Nuclear Operations Deactivation Program at Argonne National Laboratory is preparing nuclear material for final disposition from the Argonne Alpha Gamma Hot Cell Facility (AGHCF), and shipping the material to either Idaho National Laboratory (INL) or to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). The AGHCF is a non-reactor nuclear facility that is being transitioned from a programmatic, research and development (R&D) mission to a radioactive material handling, management, storage, and disposition mission. In the course of this conversion, inventory discrepancies are occasionally discovered. These differences can be due, in part, to entry errors, inconsistencies, or under-documentation in material databases. Another cause of differences can be chemical or physical changes in the nuclear material itself (often decades old) due to degradation, decomposition, oxidation, morphology changes, fracture, abrasion, or other mechanisms. A small percentage of nuclear material can be, at least temporarily, unidentified, under-identified, or misidentified.1 This talk discusses some of the methods employed for reconciling and resolving inventory discrepancies, as well as some of those that have been suggested during a January 2010 Workshop at Argonne sponsored by The Department of Energy and The Office of Health, Safety, and Security (DOE/HSS) on the analysis of nuclear inventory discrepancies.