Abstract
In the 1960's, fifty-five gallon drums of TRU waste were buried in shallow pits on remote U.S. Government facilities such as the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (now split into the Idaho National Laboratory and the Idaho Completion Project [ICP]). Subsequently, it was decided to remove the drums and the material that was in them from the burial pits and send the material to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. Several technologies have been tried to locate the drums non-intrusively with enough precision to minimize the chance for material to be spread into the environment. One of these technologies is the placement of steel probe holes in the pits into which wireline logging probes can be lowered to measure properties and concentrations of material surrounding the probe holes for evidence of TRU material. There is also a concern that large quantities of volatile organic compounds (VOC) are also present that would contaminate the environment during removal. In 2001, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) built two pulsed neutron wireline logging tools to measure TRU and VOC around the probe holes. The tools are the Prompt Fission Neutron (PFN) and the Pulsed Neutron Gamma (PNG), respectively. They were tested experimentally in surrogate test holes in 2003. The work reported here estimates the performance of the tools using Monte-Carlo modelling prior to field deployment. A MCNP model was constructed by INEEL personnel. It was modified by the authors to assess the ability of the tools to predict quantitatively the position and concentration of TRU and VOC materials disposed around the probe holes. The model was used to simulate the tools scanning the probe holes vertically in five centimetre increments. A drum was included in the model that could be placed near the probe hole and at other locations out to forty-five centimetres from the probe-hole in five centimetre increments. Scans were performed with no chlorine in the earth around the probe hole and with three concentrations of chlorine. The PFN is configured with two detectors, and therefore data from the scans can be used to gauge the approximate distance of a drum from the probe-hole. The PNG uses ratios of gamma-ray intensities from a specific element to estimate the quantitative distance to the drum. Moreover, the PNG can distinguish VOC materials in the formation from those in the drum if there is sufficient contrast in the concentrations. The PNG and PFN can be used together to assist in planning the safe removal of contaminated materials, both TRU and VOC.