Sample verification instrumented receiver

Large amounts of nuclear waste have been generated over 50 years of nuclear weapons fabrication. There are approximately 177 one-million-gallon tanks which contain a mixture of nuclear waste. With the end of the cold war, the emphasis has shifted from making nuclear weapon-grade material to cleaning up the nuclear waste. To effectively clean up the waste, it must be treated; however, to treat it, the waste must be characterized. Westinghouse Hanford Company (WHC) has developed remotely operated waste-sampling equipment that is lowered into the tanks to physically retrieve a core sample of the waste. The waste is removed and placed into a shipping container for transport to an analytical lab. In a number of cases, the core sampler, which was supposed to be filled with waste, arrived at the lab empty. This raised a number of concerns about whether the sampling equipment was operating properly. This generated a need to verify that the sampler had a waste sample in it before it was loaded into the shipping container. One approach was the sample verification instrumented receiver (SVIR). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the technology used in the SVIR and initial testing results