Re: RADSAFE digest 158

["jimsims@vaxb.acs.unt.edu" <JIMSIMS@vaxb.acs.unt.edu>]

Sue Dupre of Princeton asked about inventories at other
institutions...

Our institution has a specific license in an agreement state. Our
license is written so that Quarterly isotope inventories are required
from users. These quarterly reports are collected at the regular
Quarterly Radiation Safety Committee meetings and the RSO and his
staff compiles the institutional quarterly inventory from these
reports.

We have a centralized ordering and received system. So we know what
gets ordered and what comes in. We inspect and deliver packages
directly to the labs. We also generate the running inventory sheet for
the shipment which goes into the user's log book. We have had trouble
in the past getting users to log in their isotopes. Doing it for them
seems to work well.

We have had problems getting users to decay correct their inventories.
The HP staff wrote a HyperCard stack which runs on Macs to do the
decay calculations for them. This works fairly well for those who have
Macs, which is about 85% of users.

The HP staff picks up wastes directly from labs. Estimates of activity
for dry wastes are provided by the user. Users get a receipt for the
waste. This is a two part form and the HP staff retains a copy. Users
don't report waste transfers, this is done by the HP staff. We also
pickup liquids and do all disposals of these materials. Users must
provide mCi/container and evidence that they counted the liquids
correctly.

Users may apply to have disposal sinks but few are willing to keep the
required records for each disposal and turn in a monthly disposal
record summing that month's disposal.

This set up is labor intensive on the part of the HP staff. We are a
small health science center with about 35 authorized users, 165 people
on badges and about 110 use areas. The HP staff is the RSO and the
ARSO.

We are currently rewriting the HyperCard application to not only keep
up with uses and the passage of time for each container of isotope but
it will also perform the quarterly inventory for them. This should
provide us with a more accurate and detailed inventory than in the
past with little if any additional effort on the part of the user.

Hope this helps,

James Sims, Ph.D., RSO
Safety Office
University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth
3500 Camp Bowie Blvd.
Fort Worth, TX  76107 - 2699
jimsims@unt.edu
817-735-2697 (voice)
817-735-2486 (FAX)