Letter Report to Review Identification and Prioritization of Radionuclide Releases from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Letter Report to Review Identification and Prioritization of Radionuclide Releases from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory
Letter Report to Review Identification and Prioritization of Radionuclide Releases from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory
Pages 1-40
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asked the National Research Council's Committee on an Assessment of CDC's Radiation Studies from DOE Contractor Sites to critically review and comment on a craft report titled Identification and Prioritization of Radionuclide Releases from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. The draft was submitted to CDC by the Risk Assessment Corporation of South Carolina (RAC)
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principally to historical exposures due to past releases. This assertion shouicl be clarified an(l, in our view, highlighte(1 in a box or sidebar (explaining that exposures clue to future offsite transport of material from historical releases were not estimated or predicted)
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with emphasis on its effect on the estimation of the results of accidental releases (a type of episodic release) of radionuclicles from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL)
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· For routine releases, in Offsite_Air Screening.xis N releases are said to be reported only in 1972, and releases in all other years have been estimated as double that value. This approach was documented in the draft report on page 38.
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For screening other years, we calculate annual releases of 58Co based on the ratio of the predicted inventory of activation products, 54Mn to 58Co, of 0.5 (Till & Meyer 1983) ." That reference is not in the reference list.
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includes an estimation of the doses resulting from routine and episodic releases based on environmental-transfer models and parameter values appropriate to the INEEL site. It is the view of the committee that it would have been better to review and, if necessary, improve the DOE results rather than to use the NCRP screening method.
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The source terms used in the draft report for routine releases are again discussed on pages 34-39. However, the only documentation of source documents in the draft report is on page 35, which indicates that "for annual releases to air for early years of operation, HDE (DOE, 1991a)
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The total emissions are not the sum of the facility emissions tabulated in FacilityAirReleases.xls, although the draft report does not make clear the relationships between the various spreadsheets—or indeed between the various sections of the draft report dealing with routine releases. The relationship between the entries in the spreadsheets FacilityAirReleases.xIs and Onsite_Air_Screening.xIs, and Offsite_Air_Releases.xIs as well as the relationships between the sections of the draft report dealing with routine releases need to be clarified.
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The committee recommends that the report list the source documents used for the routine releases, both for individual facilities and for sitewide emissions. In addition, all transcriptions from original documents should be thoroughly proofread and checked for plausibility by comparing between years and between nuclides within years.
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Accorclingly, the committee believes that episodic releases and routine releases should be separated and the rankings reported separately because the ranking methods used are not equally applicable to the two cases. Additional Comments There is a great deal of public concern about issues at INEEL and about the RAC draft report.
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report as a basis for describing episodic releases should be explained clearly and justified. Given that there was public opposition to the DOE report, basing this report largely on the findings of the earlier one requires discussion - if for no other reason, to establish public credibility for the new report.
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. Episodic releases and routine releases should be separated and the rankings reported separately because the ranking methods used are not equally applicable to the two cases.
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If you desire further elaboration on the components above or in the accompanying appendixes? please call or write Dr.
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EDMONDS, Project Assistant DORIS E TAYLOR, Staff Assistant SPONSOR'S PROJECT OFFICER JAMES SMITH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention EDITOR NORMAN GROSSBLATT 14
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The Idaho National Engineering Laboratory Site Environmental Report for Calendar Year 1988.
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Radioactive Waste Management Information for 1988 and Recorc3-To-Date.
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Furthermore, the craft report (in the spreadsheet FacilityAirReleases.xis) has no entries for TRA emissions for 1971-1973, 1975-1977, 1984-1987, and 1989.
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22. Page 15: The fuel cycle facility was not shut down in 1969; in fact, it is still operating and EBR TI underground storage is not a burial ground.
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Is this an attempt to quantify variation between instantaneous release rates, daily totals, weekly totals, monthly totals, or something else? 26.Page 19, second paragraph: The half-life of I is given here as 2.5 h.
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48. Page 39, fifth paragraph, "for our conservative screening, we assumed annual releases of Am equal to 0.36 TO of reported ' Pu releases (the percentage of plutonium)
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59. Page 54, Figure 20: Not all the wells shown in the DOE report are shown here.
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to Atmosphere. INEEL Task Order Database MC Number 601~ I" does not convey much information to a reader.
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It is to these that the committee now turns. Meteorology The treatment of meteorologic conditions for the episodic releases (pages 6265)
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and in the RAC draft report, and their ratio together with the ctraft report relative screening factor Description IET #10(B)
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Releases that DOE treats in multiple periods have been arbitrarily assigned the same ciraft report dispersion factor and screening value for all periods. Examination of the table shows that if the dispersion factors obtained by DOE (1991a)
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. Episodic releases On page 5S, the draft report treats the concept of release fractions for the first time.
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For TET-3, the solids release fraction of 0.0054 implies a mass of 220 g of uranium released of the total of 40,800 g given on page 70. A note in {ET-3.xls indicates that the activities used in the draft report are supposed to correspond to 93.4°/O enriched uranium, 37 fuel assemblies, 1100 g/assembly, and a release fraction of 0.0054.
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For individual facilities, it appears that the only itemization of source documents for routine releases is in the spreadsheet FacilityAirReleases.xIs, where we find {CPP releases 1953-1963 DOE (1991a)
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The statement should be corrected, presumably to something like "for this particular location, the calculated relative screening value increases with increasing transit time (that is, because of lower wind speed)
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These two release rates coincide only at an average nuclear heat production of 20 MW. The draft report apparently unnecessarily overestimates Ar production by about 76%.
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However, because the uranium responsible for fission-product release was coated as a thin film, it might be more appropriate to model this release with a release Faction of 1 for all fission products (or perhaps ~ for all but solids and 0.5 for solids, to account for decay recoil either out of the uranium film or into it) and to adjust the burnup to match the total emission rate.
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Many of the episodic releases were inclucle(1 in the routine releases reported by DOE (1991a, Table A-19~. It would be useful to indicate which of the episodic releases were included in the routine releases in the draft report and to state the fractional contribution of the episodic releases to the routine release estimates and screening-factor estimates.
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ETR: The listed evaporation rate appears extremely low.
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The user manual for RSAC-5.2 is freely available at http://ar.inel.gov, ant! a better copy is available through the Racliation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC)
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Although this criticality event was treated as an episodic release, too, we assumed that all releases in our assessment were routine for a conservative screening approach." In fact, DOE (1991a) has an entry of 1.55E+03 Ci, not 1.33E+03, for routine releases (Table A-39 on page A-194.
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agree with the values of 0 for source of the 1000-fold discrepancy introduced by the note in the spreadsheets requires further elucidation.
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(at 3/17/2001~. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July31, 1995 RADIATION EXPERIMENT RECORDS MADE AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC Historical records found at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory concerning past radiation experiments are available in the Department of Energy public reacting room at University Place, 1776 Science Center Drive in Idaho Falls.
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The studies were a collaborative effort of the U.S. Weather Bureau Research Station at the National Reactor Testing Station and the Nuclear Science and Engineering Corporation of Pittsburgh, Penn.
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11. Page 25, fifth paragraph, line 6: Change "was" to "were".
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20. Page 64,second paragraph, line 1: "concnetration" should be "concentration" 21.
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