Campus Currents

Engineer’s Innovative Idea Solves Container Problem

What’s in the box? For helping Duratek, Inc., to answer this question faster, Don Riley, associate professor of engineering, was recently presented with an Innovation Award by the company. Riley has been a consultant to the environmental remediation and radioactive materials disposition company for 14 years.

Riley’s time and money-saving idea enabled Walla Walla College computers to be remotely accessed and controlled by engineers at Duratek to solve hundreds of problems related to potential contents of hazardous waste containers located at Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Wash.

After years of non-stop production during World War II and the Cold War, Hanford’s hazardous waste was stored until some other way of dealing with it could be found, says Riley. Years have passed since the waste was stored, and despite systems used to track the containers, the contents are not always known.

To analyze unknown contents, the measurements of radioactivity within the container are taken from six different angles with a Geiger counter. Then they are compared to an analysis that will predict what those six measurements are, based on known radioactive sources. Different analyses of comparison would have the measurements of variable contents, such as radioactive waste uniformly distributed within the container, or one radioactive object sitting within the container and the different locations at which it could be located. The analyses also take into account the size and volume of the container and whether or not it is filled to capacity. There are many variables for comparison.

Each computer run of these models takes between eight hours and two days to complete, says Riley, and the last group of runs contained 440 models. If solved one at a time, these runs could take more than two-and-a-half years on one fast computer. Riley, noticing how much difficulty the company was having trying to come up with computers to put to work on these models, came up with a solution to group together 25 computers in a pc lab at WWC that were unused during the summer months.

Senior electrical engineering student Barry Grussling helped Riley by writing a program to automate the procedure. The program selects models that have not yet been run and puts the next available computer to work on them.

“I think the most satisfying part was to realize that with a pretty simple idea, suddenly the effort with which they do it, and the inconvenience to people is now gone. Now all of the problems can be done quickly and cheaply,” says Riley. W

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