In early February, Radiation Protection representatives from each of the Utilities Service Alliance fleet members gathered for a week-long work shop at DC Cook with a singular goal: developing a fleet-wide program to control and monitor alpha contamination.
The effort that stems from EPRI’s revision to industry guidelines for alpha contamination; the industry has until June to implement the guidelines. USA’s Radiation Protection Core Peer Team members discussed the new guidelines just after they were released and decided it was a good opportunity to move forward with a fleet approach.
That decision led the team meeting at Cook to hash out the details — and it proved successful.
“The ability to bring everyone together to focus on the implementation of the new guidelines is invaluable,” Brad Cole, the RP Core Team lead and Xcel Energy’s RP corporate functional area manager, said. “All the attendees were very engaged.”
The new alpha guidelines provide a standardized and graded approach to monitor and control alpha contamination — which is most common with systems and components associated with fuel, radwaste systems and spent fuel pools.
The goal of the new guidelines is safety. The guidelines protect workers in nuclear power plants from such contamination and prepare sites to respond to an event if needed.
“As Radiation Protection professionals, we have an obligation to protect workers from alpha contamination and to monitor as accurately as possible any uptake to accurately assess dose,” Cole said. “That is what these new guidelines offer to our fleet.”
With safety as a guide, those who gathered at Cook discussed a range of topics around alpha contamination, including ALARA planning, fuel performance, instrumentation, air sampling, training and critical surveys.
Members grouped together by site at first so specific questions could be asked during the interaction. The team members then broke into groups by the topics listed above. Each group session was led by Cook personnel, who then championed and will implement those aspects into the Cook program.
During introductions, each site gave a summary of its alpha program’s current state. That revealed that the fleet sites are in varying stages to meet the revised EPRI guidelines.
But the work shop did much to improve the fleet’s chance for success. In addition to working out procedures, the team also established a support group the sites can consult when implementing the changes.
The unique approach and model of using a working workshop maximized the USA fleet value: the team targeted benchmarking, shared expertise, adoption of fleet-specific program approach, specific feedback on plant-specific procedures/processes.
“Based on the success of this work shop, we now have the procedures to meet the new guidelines,” Cole said. “Now, each of our fleet sites must put these into a program and implement them.”
Radiation Protection professionals from the USA fleet members gather at DC Cook in February to discuss new alpha contamination guidelines from EPRI.