Decontamination is a major decommissioning activity that may be used to accomplish several goals, such as reducing occupational exposures, limiting potential releases and uptakes of radioactive materials, permitting the reuse of components, and facilitating waste management. The decision to decontaminate should be weighed against the total dose and cost. This document presents both proven and emerging techniques which may be used to accomplish the goals stated above. The planner must familiarise himself or herself with these techniques to integrate decontamination with other decommissioning activities.

At its thirteenth meeting on October 20-23, 1992, in Rome, the Technical Advisory Group of the NEA Co-operative Programme for the Exchange of Scientific and Technical Information Concerning Nuclear Installations Decommissioning Projects established a Task Group on Decontamination in order to prepare a state-of-the-art report on decontamination in connection with decommissioning. The work focused on decontamination for dose reduction as well as for waste decategorisation or for conditional or unconditional release of materials. The decontamination of both metallic and concrete surfaces was considered.

During its early meetings, the group developed a questionnaire, which was sent to decommissioning project managers. The information requested in this questionnaire covered the technical and economical aspects of the selected decontamination techniques. Project managers were asked to complete a separate questionnaire for each specific application of a given process, including actual data on the efficiency of the process as well as data on operating and investment costs.

This overview of decontamination techniques is intended to describe some of the critical elements involved in choosing techniques to address practical decontamination problems.

This overview of decontamination techniques is based on the results of the previouslymentioned questionnaire, which was received, reviewed and summarised for this report by the Task Group. The information presented here is not exhaustive, but does represent the state-of-the-art, for the techniques mentioned, as of June 1998. This overview is intended to describe some of the critical elements involved in choosing techniques to address practical decontamination problems.