radiochemical analysis
    Radiochemical Analysis  

     

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
  • Shielded 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 supporting decontamination reagent development studies
  • Analysis of active materials using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) / energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), atomic absoption (AA) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICPMS)
  • Analytical and radiochemical analysis of samples
  • Chemical research experiments
  • Storage 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 is10 TBq.