Environmental Remediation and Using a New Sorting and Free Release System for Contaminated Soil at NPP A1 Site, Slovakia

Environmental remediation at NPP A1 site is even presently a continual process of removing the contamination from the ground or auxuliary objects within the NPP A-1 site with accidentally shut down reactor. This paper mainly deal with monitoring, sorting out and disposal of large volumes of removed contaminated soil stored temporarily until now at the site which is necessary for enhancement of environmental radiation situation at the site. It was also one of the topic of the Decommissioning Project of NPP A1, Slovakia, - Phase No I, lasted from 1999 to 2008. Within the project, attention was paid to development of technical tools for handling with and monitoring of large volume of contaminated soil, as well. Besides short description of contaminated lands at the site, sources of their contamination and to date known inventory, details of a pilot contaminated soil sorting facility developed and tested recently within the Decommissioning project will be described and discussed in the papper. The paper topics include description of and uncertainty analysis results for the pilot soil sorting system based on the Canberra-Packard pilot conveyer belt monitor with a pair of 1.5 inch LaBr scintilation detectors and integrated electronic belt scale. In addition experiences learned during the metrological testing and operational trial will be summarised. MDA for Cs-137 of this system is 140 Bq/kg for 30 kg and 50 Bq/kg for 300 kg parts of soil at 500 Bq/kg of 40K and 0.15 mikroGy/h.Copyright © 2009 by ASME