PHOENIX — With a wireless networking infrastructure one contractor called “young,” dealing with the torrents of data generated by monitoring the Hanford Site’s millions of gallons of liquid nuclear waste can be challenging.
“For those of you that have just tried to put a router in your house and make it work with your multiple things? Think that, times a million out at Hanford,” Karthik Subramanian, one-system manager for tank farms contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), said here during a panel discussion at the annual Waste Management Symposium.
“There’s many series of instruments that are direct reading and spectroscopic in nature,” Subramanian said. “These instruments are essentially reading every two seconds, continuously, and reporting the tank farm software control system. As you can imagine, that adds up to millions of data points very, very quickly.”
From one tank alone, the leaking AY-102 double-shell tank that WRPS recently emptied ahead of a regulatory deadline, the contractor collected about 15 million data points over two weeks, Subramanian said.
“To contrast that, when we have our traditional program … a person just goes out there with a handheld instrument, that would be in the thousands of data points,” Subramanian said. “Now you know why we have a challenge with the communication system. We’re bombarding it with data.”
The bombardment will continue, as WRPS has set its sights on collecting more data during times when workers agitate the tank waste and stir up potentially toxic and caustic chemicals, to which some workers have said they were exposed at Hanford last spring. The eventual goal is to gather enough data to be able to predict what WRPS President Mark Lindholm called a “vapor event.”
“We think that’s very important,” Lindholm said on the panel. “I want WRPS to be known as the company that finally resolved how we’re going to handle tank vapors.”
