The Hanford Site is home to 177 large, underground nuclear waste storage tanks.. This paper describes a screening study carried out in the mid 1990?s that used the tank waste level measurements to assess the tanks for potential flammable gas hazards. At the time of the study, 25 of the 177 tanks were on the Flammable gas watch list. The use of this monitoring data provided additional insight, resulting in operational changes on the Hanford site. The analytic method used for this screening was to look for an inverse correlation between waste level measurements and ambient atmospheric pressure. If the waste level in a tank decreases with an increase in ambient atmospheric pressure, then the compressibility may be attributed to gas trapped within the waste.
Revised: November 10, 2005 |
Published: September 18, 2002
Citation
Whitney P.D., and G. Chen. 2002.Screening the Hanford tanks for trapped gas.Environmetrics 13, no. 5-6:411-427.PNNL-SA-34492.