The Westinghouse Savannah River Technology Center was requested by it`s sister site, West Valley Nuclear Service (WVNS), to develop a remote inspection system to gather wall thickness readings of their High Level Waste Tanks. WVNS management chose to take a proactive approach to gain current information on two tanks t hat had been in service since the early 70`s. The tanks contain high level waste, are buried underground, and have only two access ports to an annular space between the tank and the secondary concrete vault. A specialized remote system was proposed to provide both a visual surveillance and ultrasonic thickness measurements of the tank walls. A magnetic wheeled crawler was the basis for the remote delivery system integrated with an off-the-shelf Ultrasonic Data Acquisition System. A development program was initiated for Savannah River Technology Center (SRTC) to design, fabricate, and test a remote system based on the Crawler. The system was completed and involved three crawlers to perform the needed tasks, an Ultrasonic Crawler, a Camera Crawler, and a Surface Prep Crawler. The crawlers were computer controlled so that their operation could be done remotely and their position on the wall could be tracked. The Ultrasonic Crawler controls were …

We could become convinced that a particular theory of very-high-energy physics is correct if (1) it has a tightly constrained structure and is linked strongly enough with observed particle interactions, or (2) it predicts new physics beyond the standard model which is discovered. The author makes the case that experiments of this decade and the next allow the possibility that we might become convinced that grand unification, a candidate theory of the second type, is correct.

Increasing the content limits of radioactive material packagings can save money and increase transportation safety by decreasing the total number of shipments required to transport large quantities of material. The contents of drum packages can be limited by unacceptable containment vessel pressures and temperatures due to the thermal properties of the insulation. The purpose of this work is to understand and predict the effects of insulation properties on containment system performance.