Abstract

The Servicio Geológico Colombiano has the only facility licensed to manage waste and disused radioactive sources in the country: “Centralized Facility for Radioactive Waste Management (ICGDR, in Spanish)”. Radioactive waste processing practices include pretreatment and conditioning in preparation for final disposal; sometimes received waste units must be subjected to volume reduction and segregation to ensure that what will remain in the controlled area of transient storage of the ICGDR is constituted exclusively by radioactive material. Currently, within the units stored waiting for their conditioning, there are several collimators that occupy approximately 15% of this area and contain mostly nonradioactive material. With the aim of minimizing the occupation of these waste units, and due to the lack of a procedure for their processing, it is proposed to develop a protocol for the reduction of volume of waste units of this type, which includes a guide for segregation through disassembly and removal of radioactive parts. The experimental identification of the depleted uranium parts (U-238) was possible through the implementation of in situ and portable techniques: high-resolution gamma-ray spectrometry and X-ray fluorescence. Thanks to this methodology, it was possible to determine the parts and characteristics of the radioactive material that made up the collimator. The radioactive material represented 10% of the volume of the initial waste unit, allowing it to proceed to its conditioning and temporary storage, while the remaining frame was arranged outside the ICGDR as usable material or hazardous waste according to the hazardous characteristics of each segregated part.