Metrology for decommissioning nuclear facilities: Partial outcomes of joint research project within the European Metrology Research Program.

Decommissioning of nuclear facilities incurs high costs regarding the accurate characterisation and correct disposal of the decommissioned materials. Therefore, there is a need for the implementation of new and traceable measurement technologies to select the appropriate release or disposal route of radioactive wastes. This paper addresses some of the innovative outcomes of the project "Metrology for Decommissioning Nuclear Facilities" related to mapping of contamination inside nuclear facilities, waste clearance measurement, Raman distributed temperature sensing for long term repository integrity monitoring and validation of radiochemical procedures.

Monte Carlo optimization of shielding for novel industrial free release measurement facility.

Monte Carlo (MC) simulations were done for the optimization of shielding configuration of a novel industrial radionuclide-specific pre-selection free release measurement facility. The shielding is made from unique bricks of concrete with very low specific activity of natural radionuclides. The final configuration was selected as a compromise between shielding volume and the simulated 1461keV full-energy peak detector count rates of natural K.