Year
1989
Abstract
Mixed radioactive and hazardous wastes have been disposed and stored at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) for several years in a ground fill environment. Containers of some wastes have disintegrated, allowing their contents to migrate through fractured basalt toward the Snake River Plain Aquifer. The Department of Energy (DOE) has established the Buried Waste Program (BWP) to develop and implement a safe remedial process for the stabilization and/or removal of stored waste at the INEL Radioactive Waste Management Complex. This paper will present the results of an assessment to determine the risk associated with three proposed remedial methods for waste retrieval using conventional Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) techniques. The three methods under study are remote excavation of the pit with post-separation and repackaging, in-situ vitrification, and vapor vacuum extraction.The purpose of the PRA is to evaluate the probability of occurrence and the consequences of the undesired events of explosion, criticality, and fire. Those events can lead to such consequences as release of toxic and radioactive waste into the environment, personnel injury, and property damage. The PRA event/fault tree approach will be used to determine these values for each retrieval method.