Keeping an accurate nuclear material inventory is crucial for the safe and secure operation of a nuclear facility run under the Department of Energy, or any organization or regulatory body. Regulations provide detailed safety guidelines to enforce the proper handling of inventory. Complying with these regulations requires repetitive tasks consisting of detailed calculations; this makes it error-prone for humans, but easy for computers. Given that these calculations and regulations are easy for computers to perform, we were surprised to find a lack of commercially available, nuclear material-specific inventory platforms. Instead, we found that many of the facilities at our Lab were using either paper-based inventories or applications that were never intended for nuclear material tracking. In 2017, we began development and implementation of our own NUclear material TRacking applicatiON, or NUTRON. It has been running at the INL for six years and is being used by over 20 facilities, with on-boarding efforts continuing across the whole Lab. When approaching the development of this application, we wanted to focus on four major areas of concern: security, history and auditing, error reduction, and standardization.
Year
2024
Abstract