NuMAS The Road to a Corporate Wide Nuclear Material Accounting System

On September 12, 1994, the Paducah Gaseous Difision Plant (PGDP) deployed a production version of NuMAS (Nuclear Materials Accounting System) developed primarily by the PGDP, as an outgrowth of Paducah’s involvement as a prototype site for the Department of Energy’s Local Area Nuclear Materials Accountability System (LANMAS). The NuMAS applicatio~ a Windows application that presently runs on a local area netwo~ is largely generic in nature, making the concept and coding experiences somewhat portable to other facilities. Recently,NuMAS has been selected by the United States Energy Corporation (USEC) to be the corporate-wide model for a nuclear material accounting system. This decision aflkcts the Paducah site, Portsmouth Gaseous Dfision Plant and the eventual deployment of advanced laser isotope separation (AVLIS) technology. NuMAS is proving to be a viable, cost-effective alternative to existing mainframe and minicomputer solutions. Additionally, it is designed and coded to be easily configurable to other sites. The need for a corporate-wide nuclear material accounting system highlighted opportunities for improvements in the existing application. Those opportunities included 1) the need to coordinate and support larger development teams making program modifications, 2) the need for the application to support a wider variety of types of nuclear material, 3) the need to have any site specific code readily identifiable and in separate modules, 4) the need to expand current table documentation to support multiple sites, and 5) the need to keep constantly changing documentation current and available to developers. Additionally,preparation for NRC oversight highl@ted other opportunities for improvement such as increased flexibility in definitions of type of materials and also in the definitions of ownership of material.