[ RadSafe ] Texas LLRW Site

[JPreisig at aol.com]

Dear Radsafe,
 
     From:     _jpreisig at aol.com_ (mailto:jpreisig at aol.com)     .
 
 
     Hope you are all doing well.   HP  abstracts for the HP Society 
Meeting in Sacramento,
California are out now, as a supplement to Health Physics magazine.   
Always interesting
reading.  One item is on DU by Bob Cherry.
 
     Operational Radiation Safety (another HPS journal)  has an article on 
Decommissioning of the
Brookhaven Lab High Flux Beam reactor.  Fuel and spent fuel are  gone.  
Heavy Water is gone.
Interesting reading.  I guess that's one way of totally stopping  the 
tritium leak source term.
The offending leaking fuel storage pool was drained.  Goodbye.   Wonder 
what they'll do with the
Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor.  I don't think there was anything  
wrong with it..
 
    There's an abstract on the new Texas LLRW (Low Level  Radioactive 
Waste) facility and some
modeling they did.  The radionuclides of interest are C-14, Tc-99,  I-129, 
possibly among others.
I guess tritium is not that big a deal in such a facility, due to its short 
 half-life.  These radionuclides
are particularly mobile in the groundwater environment, as referred to in  
my earlier RADSAFE
postings.  These Texas folks did some computer modelling and describe  what 
they did.  Wonder why
they didn't just use Femwater-BLT (Suen and Sullivan???),  Lewater, Lewaste 
or similar computer
codes.  Last I heard, Femwater-BLT was available for use on a personal  
computer.  It is or was
available for a fee from the RSICC, the Radiation Shielding Information  
Center at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory (USA).  Other Radiation computer codes are  available.  
Finally, if you see a computer
code you are interested in, you can search it out on the internet, and then 
 email the original
programmers/designers for information on how to obtain such a computer  
code.  No big deal.
 
     These newfangled small, modular reactors are also  addressed in an 
abstract.  Sounds like
some of them will be deployed by the TVA, in the Tennessee Valley.   
Newfangled nuclear 
electricity for people/homes/businesses previously not on the electricity  
grid.
 
    NJ Nuke plants and workers, thanks for the 50% of the  electricity (in 
NJ) that you are providing to
air condition part of my home this summer!!!!  Take Care...
 
    Regards,    Joseph R. (Joe) Preisig,  PhD