Safety and safeguards by design - Glove box in-line waste assay system

The work discussed in this paper focuses on creating a device for processing low-level nuclear waste produced from glove box operations on plutonium as well as improving the process to undertake this task. Clean up items such wipes and rags are contaminated with plutonium during the normal operations. Assaying of waster drums is currently performed after the drums are filled with contaminated waste items. As a result, it is possible that a waste drum may contain more than allowable limits of radioactivity. In such cases, the drum contents must be unloaded into additional drums to distribute the radioactivity to the allowable limits per drum. In this work we have analyzed the current process and developed and designed a new device for online assaying of glove box waste drums. By monitoring the radioactivity levels per drum during glove box operations, we have mitigated the possibility of overloading a drum beyond the allowable activity levels. The mechanical operation of the device was tested and proved to meet design and customer specifications. Suitable radiation detectors were researched and selected for compatibility with the mechanical automation device and desired counting of radioactivity