This is the last morning of the show floor and exhibitors are packing up so just enough time for a last walk around.
Iso Pacific were displaying their S3 soil sorting system. This is a mobile unit that fits on a flatbed and can be sent to virtually anywhere in mainland USA in a few days. Soil is dumped through a hopper onto a conveyor. It is then levelled to a known height and moves under a detector. Knowing the height of soil and speed of conveyor a computer can work out the contamination levels. If clean, it exits one way and if above limits it exits another. More information can be found from them or, if you are a subscriber there's quite a lot on it, and their work at Hanford, in the Idea Catalog.
Andrew Szilagyi was joined by Julia Tripp in chairing a session on D&D of US DOE Facilities. Mike Serrato (SRNL) presented on the in situ decommissioning (ISD) work at Savannah River. Mike gave us a great tour around P&R reactors last year as part of the ISD meeting we ran. SRNL are leading the way in grout formulations for ISD and the associated performance assessments to make the case for ISD. For some applications ISD makes so much sense; it is cheaper, it is safer and it is quicker than knocking buildings down and just moving the waste (that is now a larger volume) somewhere else. The work SRNL are doing (and showing to regulators and other stakeholders) demonstrate that you don't just pump a load of cement into an old building and that's that! There is a lot of work in proving that it is a long term solution. It is done on a case by case basis and we are looking forward to starting the "ISD Resource Document" soon to explain more.
In between we were also demonstrating our Genie App. This is the chatbot for nuclear decommissioning we are developing and we have just managed to get it deployed to Google Assistant. It's taken a while, with many hurdles to overcome, but we are there! It is early days, but the aim is for it to provide people with knowledge about decommissioning without having to search out an expert - at least in the first instance. So, if you have Google Assistant on your phone, or have a Google Home Hub please try it out.
To get to it you need to say: "Hey Google, talk to the Genie chatbot". You should then be in and can start asking it about D&D. At the moment, it has information on various sites ("what do you know about Hanford?"), vendors ("what do you know about Cogentus?"), acronyms ("what is AECL?") and some basic technical questions ("what do you know about pipeline characterisation?").
Please bear in mind that Google has 1,000 people working on their system and we are somewhat limited in comparison being a small company. But new knowledge is constantly being added so check back regularly. Message me if you want something added and we can see how we can work it into the schedule.
In the evening, the conference organised tickets to a basketball game - Phoenix Suns vs. New York Knicks. Unfortunately, basketball isn't my thing.
Tomorrow, Thursday, is the last day of the conference and I hope to get that blog out on time!