The Faculty of Chemistry installs 900 m³/h high volume air sampler to detect radioactive contamination
PRESS RELEASE
- The Nuclear Safety Council has loaned the equipment, which serves as the reference infrastructure in Catalonia for the radiological monitoring of air.
The equipment has been loaned by the Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) as part of an agreement with the Environmental Radiology Laboratory (LRA) of the UB’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Chemistry, as part of the Environmental Radiological Monitoring Programme of the Sampling Stations Network (REM). Currently, only nine laboratories in Spain, eight of them belonging to universities and distributed in different autonomous communities, have equipment with similar characteristics.
The sampler is designed to collect suspended particles through a large filter, which will be collected weekly to analyse for the presence of possible radioactive elements.
The UB’s Environmental Radiology Laboratory
Since 2006, the UB’s Environmental Radiology Laboratory (LRA) has been the only one in Catalonia accredited by the Spanish National Accreditation Body (ENAC) to analyse radioactivity in a wide range of materials (water, biota, food, soil, ambient air and building materials, among others) according to the requirements of ISO/IEC 17025 regulations. It also participates as a quality control laboratory in environmental radiological monitoring in Catalan nuclear power plants through contracts awarded by the Government of Catalonia’s Radioactive Activities Coordination Service (SCAR) in multi-year public tenders.
All the data generated by the LRA under these activities are publicly available and can be consulted on the map of environmental radiological values available on the CSN website.
The laboratory also has as its main activities the control of radioactivity in drinking water, in compliance with Royal Decree 3/2023, as well as the radiological analysis of products intended for international trade.
The LRA, led by Anna Rigol, professor at the UB’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Chemistry, is supported by the Isotopic Analysis Service of the Faculty of Chemistry, headed by Joana Tent.
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