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Galson Sciences Ltd - WIPP

GSL had a series of contracts with Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Westinghouse in the period 1993-2000 for assistance with technical work at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), covering the following key:

  • Assistance in meeting regulatory compliance. GSL has wide-ranging international experience in interpretation of regulations. This stems in part from our staff's work with regulators in several countries (including the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission), and helping to prepare regulatory guidance. For the WIPP, our key tasks have been:
    •  Helping to prepare the Compliance Certification Application (CCA) during 1996, review it, and edit it to ensure its delivery to the EPA on time.
    • Taking the lead role in preparing crosswalks between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations and guidance and the material presented in the CCA.
    • Assistance to both SNL and Westinghouse in responding to EPA and stakeholder requests for additional information following submission of the CCA.
    • Responding to the international peer review of the CCA, coordinated by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA).
    • Development and maintenance of a matrix of regulatory and stakeholder material grouped by issue.
    • Review of regulatory certification documents to ensure that they did not misrepresent the WIPP project or that they were not ill-founded, and prioritization of required US Department of Energy (DOE) action.
  • Planning and Compliance Monitoring. Following the successful license application, GSL helped to develop plans and planning documents for annual budget allocation, longer-term prioritization of effort, and for compliance strategy and monitoring. In particular, GSL worked on:
    • The SPM-2 exercise for prioritizing work on the WIPP performance assessment (PA) prior to the preparation of the Application.
    • The Near-Field System Analysis and Seal System Analysis for prioritizing PA work in these two systems as part of the recertification strategy.
    • The SNL 5-year and 35-year compliance and recertification strategy.
    • The WIPP compliance monitoring strategy, including developing the interface between the Westinghouse data collection programme and the SNL PA programme, and the use of regulatory trigger values.
    • Identification of monitoring commitments.
  • Information management. GSL has been at the forefront internationally of the development of electronic systems for the management and tracking of compliance relevant information. This effort has been focused in three main areas:
    • Electronic compilation of the entire compliance baseline (CCA, EPA documents, stakeholder comments) on a single CD ROM.  The material is hypertext-linked, searchable, and grouped by issue.  GSL has also provided Westinghouse with a stand-alone parallel development that identifies the main documentary material relating to key issues raised by the EPA and stakeholders.
    • Development of a conceptual data model for the entire WIPP project as part of the WIPP Relational Data Management initiative.
    • Implementation of the PA-relevant part of the WIPP conceptual data model as a relational database and user front-end.  This system was originally delivered as a stand-alone product called  PASS V2.0.  More recently, it has been redeveloped and expanded as a web-based system called PA_TARDIS.