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[Music Playing]
Hi, I'm Brian Ramdwar the Laboratory Operations Branch Manager
and this is Dr. Shannon Snellings, the laboratory Senior Chemist.
And we're here today to give a tour of the laboratory
and give you guys a sense of what this laboratory
will be doing to support the PCAPP project.
So the laboratory size is about 7,000 square feet
the laboratory was actually built in Georgia
in modular sections, and in December of 2010
those 11 or 12 modular sections were shipped
across country on flatbed trucks
and within a week or two period the laboratory
was actually assembled.
One of the primary functions of this laboratory is to
provide air monitoring for the air around the site
to make sure our staff is safe and protected,
and we do that by a couple ways. We have instruments
that are positioned out in the plant area
they're called Mini-CAMS
Miniature, air monitoring, continuous systems.
There's about a hundred-fifteen, a hundred-twenty
of these instruments around the plant area.
There's actually not many areas that you can walk into
in the plant area where there's not a Mini-CAMS monitoring
the location you're actually standing.
And these instruments again take a sample every
five minutes, analyze it, produces a result.
When you do the math, every five minutes
24 hours a day, 7 days a week
a hundred-fifteen, a hundred-twenty Mini-CAMS,
that's almost 35,000 air samples a day we're taking.
So one of the instruments we use in the laboratory
to analyze the various waste streams is an instrument
called a gas-chromatograph.
You may have seen a gas-chromatograph on television shows
such as CSI, Crime Scene Investigation units.
It's the exact same type of unit, it looks for a
different compounds in a sample.
Hello there, I'm Shannon Snellings, I am Senior Chemist
here at the laboratory. One of my jobs is to take the samples
from the different sites, and analyze them for mustard.
One of the key things that I do is make sure that those methods
can detect mustard in the presence of interfering compounds.
So the laboratory at full complement will have about
a hundred-ninety staff members working in the lab
Now, that may seem like a lot, when you look at the size
of our building, which is about 7,000 square feet,
but just remember, we're working a 24-7 operation out here,
so we actually operate this laboratory with four shifts of
staff members, so we cover a 24-hour schedule.
Our staff shifts are 12 hours, so on any given day we'll
have a shift working day shift, and a shift working night shift
and the next day we'll have another shift working day
shift and night shift. So that's one of the reasons
we have about 190 folks that'll be working for the laboratory.
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