CHEMICAL ANALYSIS QUALITY ASSURANCE AT THE IDAHO CHEMICAL PROCESSING PLANT

The Idaho Chemical Processing Plant (ICPP) is a uranium reprocessing facility operated by Westinghouse Idaho Nuclear Company for the Department of Energy at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL). The chemical analysis support required for the plant processes is provided by a chemical analysis staff of 67 chemists, analysts, and support personnel. The documentation and defense of the chemical analysis data at the ICPP has evolved into a complete chemical analysis quality assurance program with training/qualification and requalification, chemical analysis procedures, records management and chemical analysis methods quality control as major elements. The quality assurance procedures are implemented on a central analytical computer system. The individual features provided by the computer system are automatic method selection for process streams, automation of method calculations, automatic assignment of bias and precision estimates at analysis levels to all method results, analyst specific daily requalification or with-method-use requalification, untrained or unqualified analyst method lockout, statistical testing of process stream results for replicate agreement, automatic testing of process results against pre-established operating, safety, or failure limits at varying confidence levels, and automatic transfer and report of analysis data plus the results of all statistical testing to the Production Department.