Description

WMT's medium/high active laboratories are a purpose-designed facility, extremely flexible and can be readily tailored to fit customer requirements.  Facilities and operations include:

• Gloveboxes for alpha work; including corrosion studies
• Sheilded gloveboxes for higher activity studies
• Characterisation and analysis of alpha material
• Waste characterisation and analysis
• Preparation of active materials for examination by various analytical methods in this and other facilities
• Small scale bench and loop experiments support decontamination reagent development studies
• Analysis of active materials using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) / energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), atomic absorption (AA) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICPMS)
• Analytical and radiochemical analysis of samples
• Chemical research experiments
• Storge of radioactive and nuclear materials
• Microstructural analysis using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) / secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS), x-ray diffraction (XRD) and SEM /EDS.

The laboratories form a key component of the integrated radioactive waste management service offered by Waste Management Technology.

Radiological areas and radioactive inventories

WMT's medium/high active laboratories comprise three areas:
A Category 3 Facility designated as Controlled with Contamination Moderate/Radiation Moderate
Radioactive Materials Store; designated as Controlled with Radiation High
The Microstructural Laboratory; designated as Supervised.
A wide range of different radionuclides can be received.  In order to control the total inventory, all material received into the building is assigned equivalent activities of ‘standard’ radionuclides by using inhalation or dose rate equivalence; 239Pu for alpha emitters, 90Sr for beta emitters and 60Co for gamma emitters.  Material is acceptable for receipt if the sum of equivalent radionuclide activities for each category remain below the facility safety case permitted limits.  The permitted limits are:

Item	Equivalent radionuclide	Permitted equivalent activity
Total α emitters	239Pu	8 GBq
Total β emitters	90Sr	9 GBq
Total γ emitters	60Co	50 GBq

The Tritium limit is 10 TBq