Prediction of External Corrosion for Steel Cylinders--2004 Report

Abstract

Depleted uranium hexafluoride (UF{sub 6}) is stored in over 60,000 steel cylinders at the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PGDP) in Paducah, Kentucky, and at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) in Portsmouth, Ohio. The cylinders range in age from 4 to 53 years. Although when new the cylinders had wall thicknesses specified to within manufacturing tolerances, over the years corrosion has reduced their actual wall thicknesses. The UF{sub 6} Cylinder Project is managed by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) to safely maintain the UF{sub 6} and the cylinders containing it. This report documents activities that address UF{sub 6} Cylinder Project requirements and actions involving forecasting cylinder wall thicknesses. These requirements are delineated in the System Requirements Document (LMES 1997a), and the actions needed to fulfill them are specified in the System Engineering Management Plan (LMES 1997b). The report documents cylinder wall thickness projections based on models fit to ultrasonic thickness (UT) measurement data. UT data is collected at various locations on randomly sampled cylinders. For each cylinder sampled, the minimum UT measurement approximates the actual minimum thickness of the cylinder. Projections of numbers of cylinders expected to fail various thickness criteria are computed from corrosion models relating minimum wall thickness to cylinder age, initial thickness estimates, and cylinder subpopulations defined in terms of plant site, yard, top or bottom storage positions, nominal thickness, etc. In this report, UT data collected during FY03 is combined with UT data collected in earlier years (FY94-FY02), and all of the data is inventoried chronologically and by various subpopulations. The UT data is used to fit models of maximum pit depth and minimum thickness, and the fitted models are used to extrapolate minimum thickness estimates into the future and in turn to compute estimates of numbers of cylinders expected to fail various thickness criteria. A model evaluation is performed comparing UT measurements made in FY03 with model-fitted projections based only on data collected before FY03.