A Brief User's Guide to the Excel^® -Based DF Calculator

Abstract

To understand the importance of capturing penetrating forms of iodine as well as the other volatile radionuclides, a calculation tool was developed in the form of an Excel ® spreadsheet to estimate the overall plant decontamination factor (DF). The tool requires the user to estimate splits of the volatile radionuclides within the major portions of the reprocessing plant, speciation of iodine and individual DFs for each off-gas stream within the Used Nuclear Fuel reprocessing plant. The impact to the overall plant DF for each volatile radionuclide is then calculated by the tool based on the specific user choices. The Excel ® spreadsheet tracks both elemental and penetrating forms of iodine separately and allows changes in the speciation of iodine at each processing step. It also tracks 3 H, 14 C and 85 Kr. This document provides a basic user's guide to the manipulation of this tool. The DF Calculator uses two types of building blocks. The first is input blocks in which the user can insert information on the feed to the system, splits in various unit operations, and capture efficiencies for each stream of interest. The second class of blocks is the stream composition blocks or results blocks. Based on the user input, the quantity of each species reaching the stack is calculated, and an overall plant DF computed. Graphic output is also provided for each species in terms of the contribution of each of the five off-gas streams that contribute to the overall plant gaseous emissions.