Improvement of the techniques used in the decontamination of norm contaminated facilities in oil and gas industry for radiation workers safety / Mahrous Abdelhamied Elsayed Saad ; Supervised Wafaa Ahmed Khlil , Nadial lotfy Helal

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Science - Department of Biophysics

Oil and gas production processing operations have been known to produce a large amount of NORMs at elevated concentrations as by-product waste streams.Also, TE-NORM wastes from the oil & gas industry may generate radiation exposure levels, which require attention and continuous monitoring during NORM decontamination of oil and gas equipment. In this work I) we study and analyze the TE-NORM contamination from the theoretical and technical point of view during production of oil and gas in an Egyptian oil-field. This is to improve the existing decontamination techniques used in decontamination of NORM facilities to minimize the produced waste as much as possible, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed techniques by measuring the NORM existence level before and after decontamination process. For this sake: a) decontamination before disposal has been conducted, either by: Conventional wet High Pressure Jetting Water (HPJW) and/or Ultra High Pressure Jetting Water (AIN W) technologies or unconventional dry technologies. b)"Dry" decontamination method and the related decontamination facility as a dedicated tool for tubing and other small installation's decontamination using abrasive blasting machine will be discussed. *Dry" technologies may offer an advantage of (almost) zero secondary radioactive waste generation. 2) Continuous monitoring during NORM decontamination of oil and gas equipment has been conducted. Workers were monitored for one year on three months basis using the TLD badges. Ten workers were divided into two groups, working back to back 15 days on IS days off in field basis, for around 10 working hours/day

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