A major mission of the facility is the environmental cleanup of nuclear waste generated during the sites 40 year span as the nation's tritium and weapons-grade plutonium production facility. Much of the remediation effort involves sampling soils in order to analyze and direct environmental restoration projects. The sampling process is greatly enhanced by the prompt feedback to project management of sample results with a quick enough response time so as to allow adjustments in the sampling strategy and in a graphical presentation that allows project managers to visualize trends in the sample results. Prior to sampling, the expected sampling locations and depths are provided by project managers and entered into the hand-held units. Samplers record dates and times, actual location and depth of samples, tools used, comments and soil color.
Samplers also scan bottle labels that are used to collect the soil for each sample.
At the end of the day, data from the hand-held units is transferred to a PC and then uploaded to the centralized Oracle database using a C program with embedded SQL commands. One advantage to using this method for upload is that it only requires the site-licensed software, SQLNet, to be installed on the PC that is used for uploading. After loading, the sampling supervisor reviews and edits the data using an Oracle form. GQL has canned query forms and also gives the user the ability to create his own custom queries. The site intranet consists of forms that initiate perl programs which access the database using a public read-only account and results are displayed in an Excel spreadsheet or text file.