IEC advances on instruments for detecting illicitly trafficked radioactive material

GENEVA, 2006-06-06– Border guards, security staff at nuclear power plants and others whose jobs call for them to be on the lookout for illicitly trafficked radioactive material now have the IEC backing them in their work with three International Standards for these instruments.

The first, covering pocket-sized instruments, was published in February 2006. The second is for stationary equipment that would be installed at border crossings to detect radioactive sources and materials on pedestrians, cars, buses and trains. It is due out in November this year. The third, scheduled to appear in June 2007, covers a sophisticated spectrometer dose rate instrument.

Security personnel and border guards would use all three kinds of instruments to find radioactive material that is being trafficked illicitly.

Every year radioactive material is clandestinely removed from places such as nuclear power plants, oncology clinics and nuclear waste repositories, to be sold on the black market. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports that there were 548 confirmed illicit trafficking incidents between 1993 and 2003. About 41% involved nuclear material and 62% involved radioactive material other than nuclear material. The IAEA also estimates that there are several hundred other unconfirmed cases of this kind of trafficking.

While you might assume that the equipment used to detect this material is the best, the way to ensure this quality is through the International Standards developed by the IEC. A significant part of IAEA work in this area has been devoted to developing standards, tests and evaluation methods for these instruments, and for this the IEC and the IAEA collaborate closely.

As security concerns grow around the world, the market for this becomes potentially quite large. In the United States 28 companies submitted 172 different instruments for testing at 5 calibration laboratories. The United States has more than 300 points of entry, meaning airports, harbours, border crossings on land, and so forth. If every country that decided to use such monitoring issued pocket detectors to all of their border control personnel, the market becomes significant.

Technical discussions during the IAEA meetings identified the need for installed radiation monitors to be able to perform spectroscopic analysis of photon emitting radionuclides. As a result, the US National Committee proposed a new IEC project, approved this month and titled “ Spectroscopy-based portal monitors used for the detection and identification of illicit trafficking of radioactive materials.”

The three IEC standards are:

• IEC 62401– Alarming personal radiation detectors for detection of illicit trafficking of radioactive material.
• IEC 62244 – Installed radiation monitors for the detection of radioactive and special nuclear materials at national borders.
• IEC 62327 – Hand held instruments for the detection and identification of radioactive isotopes and additionally for the indication of ambient dose equivalent rate from photon radiation.