Locus Introduces Environmental Data Management System for Nuclear Facilities
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 14, 2009 — Locus Technologies (Locus), the industry leader in web-based environmental software, announced today that it has expanded its flagship product EIM to include a module for nuclear facilities information management and reporting.
Nearly all of the activities associated with water and soil protection at nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities, including the assessment of site characteristics, the ongoing monitoring of site conditions, and the remediation of adverse environmental impacts, involve the collection and/or analysis of data. The tools and systems used to manage and store this information must satisfy strict security and QA/QC requirements to ensure that only the appropriate people can access the data, and that the quality of the data adheres to the highest Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) standards. It is also critical that these applications allow engineers and scientists to do their work in a cost-effective way, allowing them to focus less of their time on finding the data they need and formatting various outputs, and more on the evaluation and analysis of these data.
The new EIM module was specifically designed for managing subsurface and other data at nuclear facilities, including commercial reactor sites, research labs, and nuclear materials production and storage complexes. The system provides an unmatched level of data security and enforces an extensive set of QC/QC requirements on all uploaded data. At the same time it provides a variety of easy-to-use options to upload, validate, flag, examine, map, plot, download, and report data. The system has the capability to store such radioanalytical parameters as uncertainty, uncertainty type (Standard, Combined Standard, and Expanded), and required method uncertainty. It also has the capability to convert weight to activity concentrations, calculate sums of ratios, and evaluate action limits that pertain to either single or groups of parameters. The system helps reporting entities enforce data quality in accordance with the NRC or other standards such as NQA-1, and ANSI/ISO/ASQ Q 9001:2000, and validate incoming analytical data.
“Locus has been present at Department of Energy (DOE) facilities such as Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) that deal with radioactive data for some time. With the highly expected return of the nuclear industry for commercial use and decommissioning of older generation power plants and weapons complexes, we felt that the market needs an off-the-shelf tool to manage radioactive data that are subject to a different set of regulatory guidance documents from those managed under regular chemistry data under the US EPA and other guidance documents. The new radioanalytical functionality introduced through this release provides any nuclear facility that has a need for data management and reporting—and almost all have—to meet these needs using Locus’ EIM,” said Neno Duplan, President and CEO of Locus. Locus worked with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in developing the needed functionality. As part of a demonstration of the system’s flexibility and expandability to EPRI earlier this year, various statistical (sign, fraction limit, and normal distribution tests) and graphical (regression-correlation, regression with error bars, box, and rank trend plots) outputs were added to EIM’s already impressive list of analytical tools. “We are very excited to introduce this tool at the upcoming EPRI Groundwater Protection Workshop (in collaboration with NEI) to be held in Charleston, SC from September 15 to 16, 2009,” added Dr. Duplan.
EIM, Locus’ Environmental Information Management tool, is the world’s largest commercial on-demand environmental data management system. EIM completely replaces existing stand-alone data systems and reporting tools to provide a comprehensive integrated solution to one of the environmental industries’ most vexing problems – the centralization and management of complex data pertaining to contaminated water, groundwater, soil, and/or air. EIM provides for the complete electronic processing of analytical data, beginning with the upload of electronic data deliverables from labs, and terminating in state-mandated regulatory exports and reporting. EIM is deployed through Software as a Service (SaaS) model which eliminates most of the difficulties associated with the adoption of a new technology, while offering the opportunity for more rapid customization to meet the ever changing needs of its user population. The system currently stores over 120 million records for over 35,000 sites worldwide.
