Exposure management in a hot-cell decontamination and refurbishment campaign

We developed a minicomputer-based system to provide rapid access to personnel dosimetry data during a campaign to decontaminate and refurbish a hot-cell at the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF) Complex. This system allows project management to estimate doses for future tasks, assess the effectiveness of decontamination and personnel protection techniques, and balance exposures among members of various skill groups. As the campaign progresses, projected total exposures can be minimized by tradeoffs between estimated doses during decontamination and estimated dose savings during the refurbishment phase. The effectiveness of various dose-reduction procedures can be compared on the basis of data from a few cell entries before more extensive routine operations are scheduled. Because the radiation fields vary significantly with location in the cell, we find that measurements of whole-body, skin, and extremity doses are more valuable than dose-rate information. Penetrating and skin radiation doses to personnel can be compared to administrative guidelines. This helps us to select the most effective combination of protective clothing. For example, leaded gauntlets reduce the dose rate to the workers' hands, but their use can increase the time required for some in-cell tasks. Hence, use of gauntlets can lead to higher whole-body and skin doses. The programmore » is written for the HFEF Complex Harris/6 minimainframe computer with a disk-monitor operating system.« less