A POTENTIAL APPLICATION OF THE A* SEARCH ALGORITHM IN RADIOACTIVE WASTE STORAGE ARRANGEMENT

Abstract

Regardless of the technology adopted, the generation of electricity produces waste. Specific to nuclear reactor operation for generating electricity, some of the wastes are radioactive. For this type of wastes, to satisfy the objective of managing the wastes in ways that protect human health and minimize the impact on the environment, the wastes would need to be isolated or diluted such that the rate or concentration of any radionuclides returned to the environment is harmless. For the discussions in this paper, the sources of the radioactive waste as well as the absolute strength of the radioactive materials it contains are not of interest. The wastes are put into containers which are moveable within the storage area. What differentiates one container to the next is the relative strength of the radiation field it emits. In the present analysis, the fact that the strength of the radiation field decreases as a function of time is used as the primary indicator that differentiates the containers. The placement of the containers within the storage area might need to be updated from time to time to accommodate new containers. The process of changing the placement of the containers from the original to the new arrangement could be treated as a mathematical optimization problem. The objective of the optimization is to minimize the number of steps needed to move the containers which means to minimize duration of the overall rearrangement process which, more importantly, translates to the minimization of the amount of radiation received by the workers performing the moves. While the overall optimization involving the determination of the sequence of containers to be moved is not covered in the present paper, the basic approach to minimize the steps to move a container from point “A” to point “B” is presented. This is where the A* search algorithm is utilized. Discussions related to the algorithm along with simple examples of how it could be utilized are presented in this paper.