Abstract
With the end of the Cold War and subsequent break up of the Soviet Union, the number of weapons in the nuclear stockpile now greatly exceeds any foreseeable future need (Quirck et al., 1993). To compensate for this excess, an estimated 20,000 nuclear warheads have been earmarked for dismantlement and storage at the Department of Energy's Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas. It is anticipated that the majority of these warheads will arrive at the Pantex facility by the year 2000. At that time, the cur-rent dismantlement and inventory procedures may not be adequate to control worker radiation exposure within administrative and federal dose limits, To control these exposures, alternate approaches to dismantlement and inventory procedures may need to be developed. One attractive approach is to automate as many activities as possible, thus reducing worker exposure. To facilitate automation of dismantlement and storage procedures, current procedures were investigated in terms of collective dose to workers, time to completion, ease of completion, and cost of automation for each task. Then a cost-benefit comparison was performed to determine which procedures would be most cost-effective to automate.
Thompson, David Andrew (1996). Dose reduction through robotics and automation of nuclear weapons dismantlement and storage procedures at the Department of Energy's Pantex Plant. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -1996 -THESIS -T467.