Performance of a HPGe System for Surface and Container Measurements - 13582
The decommissioning of a nuclear facility or post-accident cleanup is an immense engineering effort requiring an array of specialist tools and techniques. The decommissioning and cleanup activities generate large quantities of low activity waste. For economic disposal, it is desirable to certify the waste as suitable for free release. Every container must be assayed to a sufficient degree of accuracy and sensitivity so that it may be certified to be or not to be suitable for 'free release'. In a previous work, the performance of a highly-automated system for free release of large numbers of containers was presented in which the spectroscopy hardware comprised four ORTEC Interchangeable Detector Module (IDM) mechanically cooled HPGe spectrometers in conjunction with ORTEC ISOPlus waste assay software. It was shown that the system was capable of assaying large containers to free release levels in reasonable measurement times. Not all operations have enough waste to justify an automated system or rapid assay results may be required, perhaps in a remote location. To meet this need, a new mobile system has been developed for the assay of smaller objects (drums, boxes, and surfaces) In-Situ. The system incorporates the latest generation IDM-200 and ISOPlus software and a new variant of the ISOCart hardware. This paper will describe the system and performance. (authors)