Despite its advantages such as safety, unnecessary pretreatment, and decontamination of waste with complex geometry, conventional ultrasonic decontamination technology has been only used to remove loose contaminants, oil and grease, not fixed contaminants due to the limitations in increasing the intensity in the high frequency range. Thus, ultrasound has been used as an auxiliary method to accelerate chemical decontamination of radioactive wastes or chemicals were added to the solution to increase the decontamination efficiency. The recently developed high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) decontamination technology overcomes these limitations by combining multiple frequencies of ultrasonic waves in a specific arrangement, making it possible to remove most fixed contaminants, including radioactive micro particles less than 1 micrometer within half an hour. KEPCO NF and EnesG developed mobile HIFU decontamination equipment and successfully demonstrated the decontamination effect on various radionuclides found in nuclear power plants by treating radioactive metal waste to the level below free release criteria. The mobile HIFU decontamination equipment used in the demonstration can be operated anywhere where water is supplied, including controlled area in nuclear power plants, and is expected to be used widely for decontamination and free release of metal radioactive wastes.

Some of the metal waste generated from KEPCO NF is being disposed of in the form of ingots. An ingot is a metal that is melted once and then poured into a mold to harden, and it is characterized by a uniform distribution of radioactive material. When measuring the uranium radioactivity in metal ingot with HPGe detector, 185.7 keV of U-235 is used typically because most gamma rays emitted at U-235 are distributed in low-energy regions below 200 keV. To analyze radioactivity concentration of U-235 with HPGe detector more accurately, self-attenuation due to geometrical differences between the calibration source and the sample must be corrected. In this study, the MCNP code was used to simulate the HPGe gamma spectroscopy system, and various processes were performed to prove the correlation with the actual values. First an metal ingottype standard source was manufactured for efficiency calibration, and the GEB coefficient was derived using Origin program. And through the comparison of actual measurements and simulations, the thickness of the detector’s dead layers were defined in all directions of Ge crystal. Additionally instead of making an metal ingot-type standard source every time, we analyzed the measurement tendency between commercially available HPGe calibration source (Marinelli beaker type) and the sample (metal ingot type), and derived the correction factor for geometry differences. Lastly the correction factor was taken into consideration when obtaining the uranium radioactivity concentration in the metal ingot with HPGe gamma spectroscopy. In conclusion, the U-235 radioactivity in metal ingot was underestimated about 25% of content due to the self-attenuation. Therefore it is reasonable to reflect this correction factor in the calculation of U-235 radioactivity concentration.

In liquid scintillation counting, sample radioactivity is analyzed by measuring photons emitted from counting vials. Quenching effect lowers photon intensity from samples, which leads to lower counting efficiency. So an appropriate quenching correction according to characteristics of samples is important. In this study, the quenching correction for H-3 analysis was conducted according to the characteristics of paper packaging material leached samples. The leached samples are made from H-3 leaching method which is in the process of development for H-3 contamination screening. There are several ways of quenching correction such as internal standard (IS) method, quench correction curve and triple-to-double coincidence ratio (TDCR) method, etc. For quench correction curve, quenched standard set, which has the same matrix as experimental samples, is needed to be prepared. Each leached sample, however, has different matrix and color depending on condition of leaching experiment, which means that it is not capable of preparing standard set having same matrix with the samples. In this study, the counting samples are used for plotting quench correction curve instead of quenched standard set. Spectral quench parameter of the external standard [SQP(E)] is used as quench indicating parameter (QIP). TDCR and counting efficiencies determined by IS method are used as counting efficiencies. The quench curve of TDCR versus SQP(E) has R2 = 0.55 and the curve of efficiency from IS method versus SQP(E) has R2 = 0.99. TDCR is known for approximate counting efficiency, however, TDCR as counting efficiency needs careful use for H-3 analysis of leached samples. The curve used efficiency from IS method is suitable for H-3 analysis of leached samples. In this study, the quench correction curve is prepared for H-3 analysis of leached samples of paper packaging material. SQP(E), TDCR and efficiency from IS method was used as parameters to plot the quench correction curve, and, the efficiency from IS method is suitable for H-3 analysis of the leached samples. The result of this study can be used for H-3 analysis of leached samples of paper packaging material.

High-intensity focused ultrasonic (HIFU) decontamination technology to decontaminate complex metal radioactive waste was developed and verified. Ultrasonic decontamination technology is a method widely used in this field, but its energy strength is weak, so it cannot be applied to fixed contamination. The HIFU developed in this study can eliminate a wide range of fixed contamination due to the advantage of maintaining a high frequency while having hundreds of times the energy intensity compared to conventional general ultrasonic method. In addition, there is a merit in that there is no work that generates a lot of secondary wastes such as chemical decontamination method or threatens the safety of workers. In particular, high ultrasonic energy is transmitted to curved parts and inside pipes that cannot be decontaminated with blasting method, so various types of metal wastes can be treated with the HIFU method. In this study, the performance of the HIFU was verified for zirconium chips, and the radioactivity after decontamination was reduced to less than MDA in all subjects.

A method of quantitatively analyzing radioactivity of uranium waste in the In-situ measurement using Bayesian inference was proposed. When applying the traditional efficiency calibration method, which uses standard sources or Monte Carlo simulation, the radioactivity error is large depending on the degree of spread of the radioactive contamination especially in large sample such as a 200 L drum. In addition, the existing method has a limitation in that it is difficult to reflect the uncertainty according to the location of the source. In this preliminary study, to overcome the limitations of the existing method, a Bayesian statistical-based radioactivity quantitative analysis model was proposed that can increase the accuracy of analysis even in situations where radioactive contamination of uranium waste is non-uniformly distributed. As a result of evaluating the simulated waste with the proposed Bayesian method, the accuracy was improved more than about 6 times compared to the classical efficiency calibration method.