Decommissioning Health Physics
ORAU is a national leader in decommissioning health physics, supporting nuclear decommissioning of cleanup for the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our staff of highly-skilled health physicists and radiation safety experts have performed environmental assessments for federal and state agencies for more than 40 years, greatly enhancing public trust and instilling confidence in the decommissioning of contaminated sites.
Our research focus in this area welcomes collaborators from the wider health physics and decommissioning community who wish to partner with ORAU researchers for data analysis and other research related to radiological and chemical site cleanup. Specifically, we seek to engage in collaborative research projects that contribute to advancements in radiological characterization and environmental cleanup activities.
Research focus areas
- Radiation detection/instrumentation supporting MARSSIM survey techniques
- Environmental survey applications of subsurface soil
- Environmental modeling
- Field detection of non-radiological contaminants (chemicals), including expanding technical support to contaminants such as PCBs, mercury, and lead
- Integration of advanced instrumentation in final radiation surveys
- Statistics related to environmental contaminant distributions, including Bayesian approach for evaluating the acceptability of radiological and non-radiological hot spots
- Integrating surveying and sampling methodologies to improve characterization and independent verification surveys (high-resolution spatial mapping, and conventional sampling)