Monitoring & metering N
If someone asked you to picture a nuclear site, you would probably picture a large facility with the trademark massive cooling towers. However, nuclear sites vary a lot in size, from the six square kilometres of the Sellafield nuclear site to a small nuclear waste store the size of a large garage. Traditionally, the adoption of new technologies, such as remote monitoring systems, was seen as something only suited for large facilities and sites and the smaller facilities and sites were left behind. Here Gary Bradshaw, director of radiological surveillance specialist Omniflex, explains why this is no longer the case thanks to industry-certified commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products.
o matter their size, all nuclear facilities and sites have the need for radiation detectors to monitor the levels of alpha, beta and gamma radiation in the air,
whether they be processing, storage or waste facilities. However, the chances are that most of them are not equipped with any kind of remote monitoring systems, with plant managers often assuming they are too expensive or too complicated to adopt. This is because traditional nuclear radiation monitoring solutions were not simple to implement. Generally, instruments had to be manually networked to a bespoke panel, requiring a skilled wireman to spend days fitting and testing every unit. Then, they each had to be checked by an external engineer from the regulating authority before being certified for use, which again added days to the installation time. Furthermore, because the panels were not
standardised, any maintenance work required third party engineers to conduct a site visit to carry out repairs, leading to increased downtime and maintenance costs. COTS systems eliminate this complexity, without sacrificing operational performance.
OFF-THE-SHELF SOLUTIONS COTS products are ready-made, packaged solutions that are available to be purchased off-the-shelf and can be adapted to meet the end user’s specific requirements. These purchases are often alternatives to custom equipment or one-off developments and offer several key benefits for plant managers. For example, the Omniflex RPN1 radiological
protection node, that became increasingly more popular at the UK’s nuclear sites over the last decade, is a COTS product that can be installed in minutes. It is standardised to meet ISO 9001 quality levels, so there is no need for additional third-party inspections during the system installation and testing process. This helps to lower the overall project costs, save thousands of man hours of work, reduces the time spent exposed to radiation and, ultimately, get systems up and running faster. The RPN1 won the NDA innovation
award in 2016 and helped the National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) save over £1 million in project costs while reducing the time spent by personnel in the plant’s active areas. The RPN1 units have since been used in many recent projects at the Sellafield nuclear site and are specified to be used on several upcoming new projects.
The future of radiation monitoring 22 April 2022 Instrumentation Monthly
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