Liquid waste contractor at the Savannah River Site recently honored one of its employees for his analysis that will help measure environmental risk.
Office of Environmental Management
July 16, 2019
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AIKEN, S.C. – EM’s liquid waste contractor at the Savannah River Site recently honored one of its employees for his analysis that will help measure environmental risk in disposing low-level radioactive salt waste.
Savannah River Remediation Principal Engineer Steve Hommel also received the Superior Paper Award at the 2019 Waste Management Symposia (WMS) for his analysis of the correlations between key radionuclides at the Saltstone Disposal Facility (SDF).
WMS provides a forum for discussing solutions to the management and disposition of radioactive waste and decommissioning of nuclear facilities. The organization established the Superior Paper Award to recognize authors for distinguished contributions to the advancement of radioactive material management.
Hommel is the subject-matter expert for the SDF performance assessment, which is used to perform analyses to understand the risks associated with the long-term disposal of waste at the SDF.
Hommel’s analysis quantifies the relationship between the concentrations of soluble iodine-129 and technetium-99 with concentrations of cesium-137. This analysis improves predictions in the assumed SDF disposal inventories, resulting in improved predictions of future environmental risk. This analysis reduced overestimation in assumed disposal inventories, or conservative assumptions. Hommel did this by improving upon previous attempts to mathematically define the correlations between the radionuclides.
“Computer models are only as good as their inputs,” Hommel said. “While conservative assumptions are useful for demonstrating and defending compliance, they don’t always provide the most accurate representation of the future.”
Hommel’s analyses will be beneficial for years to come.
“With better modeling inputs, we can do a better job of identifying and mitigating risks to future members of the public,” he said.
The SDF assessment will be a useful tool to better inform decisions related to SDF disposal.
“Steve did a tremendous job of leveraging decades of sample data in a way that provides present day value and improves the accuracy of our inventory basis for our environmental modeling,” said Patricia Suggs, DOE-Savannah River senior program manager for salt processing.
Hommel expects his analysis approach can be repeated in the future to improve the precision of inventory estimates at SRR facilities and other sites throughout the DOE complex.
“I learned a lot while developing this analysis, and I’m looking forward to finding other applications for it at SRR,” Hommel said. “There was a lot of detailed work that went into this paper, and I’m honored to have been recognized for it.”