Breakthrough for nuclear safeguards as on-site laboratory is inaugurated in Sellafield
On 13 October the first laboratory equipped to analyse radioactive samples from a large reprocessing facility will be inaugurated at British Nuclear Fuels' Sellafield site. The laboratory, constructed on behalf of the European Commission's Euratom Safeguards Directorate, was designed and installed by the Institute for Transuranium Elements (ITU) at Karlsruhe in Germany. 'The development of the on-site laboratory is very significant in terms of improvements to nuclear safeguards' said Dr Roland Schenkel of the ITU. The new laboratory is now being hailed as a major improvement to controls to ensure that no nuclear material used for civil purposes is diverted into the military cycle. Processing plutonium samples in-situ will also help save time and money, as well as reduce the safety risks involved in transporting nuclear material from one site to another. Until now, samples of nuclear materials from reprocessing plants have had to be sent to external laboratories for testing, with the majority of samples from the Sellafield site being transported to Karlsruhe, where scientists have the equipment and expertise to perform analyses for nuclear safeguards. But the new laboratory will effectively cut out the need for this, while at the same time allowing more samples to be tested. The highly automated new laboratory is equipped with robots able to perform analyses on 1000 samples a year. It also houses glove boxes containing carefully selected and tested high precision analytical instruments and special software for information management, analysis optimisation and data evaluation designed by the scientific team. The benefits in terms of analysing plutonium samples at their point of production have been recognised by the Euratom Safeguards Directorate since the late eighties and in response to international agreements on nuclear safeguards, the Euratom Inspectorate in Luxembourg put the Institute of Transuranium Elements in Karlsruhe to work on the job. Its mission was to provide the technical support necessary for the development and installation of a safe, efficient and economic tool to analyse nuclear material - dubbed the 'on site laboratory'. Collaborating with the Euratom Safeguards Directorate, the plant operator British Nuclear Fuels, and the British safety authorities, the Karlsruhe team has successfully produced the new laboratory for Sellafield. Another is also due to be inaugurated early next year at the French nuclear reprocessing plant at Cap la Hague. And the rest of the world looks set to follow suit, with plans by the International Atomic Energy Association to open a similar on-site laboratory at a nuclear facility in Japan in just a few years time. The EU Member States and the international community strongly support this new development in improvements to nuclear safeguards, says the ITU's Dr Roland Schenkel. 'The response has been very positive from the international community', he said.