3rd Radiological and Nuclear Threats to Critical Infrastructure TG meeting

Group: 
Radiological and Nuclear Threats to Critical Infrastructure

3rd meeting on 14-15 November 2013 in Ispra Altogether 15 participants, including guests from the US (NIST) and Canada (Health Canada), took part in this meeting coordinated by STUK, Finland. The specific theme of this meeting was the so-called reachback, which refers to remote support of field teams in radiation detection. Conventional means to realize in-field work is as follows: Frontline officers or first responders operate detection instruments. If anomalous radioactivity is detected, specialists are invited to the field with more sophisticated equipment and know-how. In an alternative approach frontline officers and first responders are equipped with spectrometers that are gain stabilized, easy to use and able to send the recorded high quality data wirelessly to the analysis centre. In the analysis centre, experts follow the measurements in real time and give advice accordingly. So, data moves instead of people and samples. This guarantees fast and high quality response with less people. A report on this theme will be prepared by the TG in 2014. The TG also familiarised on site at the JRC with the ITRAP+10 radiation devices testing facility. The group will meet next time in a subgroup fashion on 6-7 February in Helsinki and on 3-4 March 2014 at CERN, Switzerland in its totality.