Scoping Inventory Calculations for the Rare Isotope Accelerator

This document is a report on our activities in FY03 exploring nuclear safety and hazard analysis issues relevant to the Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA). It is not clear whether DOE will classify the RIA as an accelerator facility subject to the accelerator-specific safety requirements of DOE Order 420.2A or as a nonreactor nuclear facility subject to the requirements of 10 CFR 830. The final outcome of this issue will have significant impact on the construction and operation of the facility and the quality assurance requirements for items or services that may affect nuclear safety. The resolution of this issue will be an important earlier decision for the RIA project team and will require early consultation with the appropriate DOE authorities. For nuclear facilities, facility hazard classification depends on the inventory of releasable radionuclides; therefore, some simplistic, scoping inventory calculations for some assumed targets and beams are done to estimate the hazard category of RIA if it is declared a nuclear facility. These calculations show that for the scenarios analyzed, RIA would produce sufficient quantities of radionuclides to be classified as a Category 3 nuclear facility. Over the lifetime of RIA operations, it may be possible to build up Category 2 quantities of 227Ac and 228Th. A storage building, separate from the driver, target, and experimental buildings, used to store and isolate accumulated targets and other hardware, can mitigate the potential impact on RIA. The more onerous requirements of Category 2 facilities would only be imposed on the storage facility and not on the rest of the RIA facilities. Some of the differences in a category 2 and category 3 facility are discussed in Appendix 1.