How reliable is your measurement equipment? Evaluation of measurement devices for radioactive and nuclear material

In all areas correlated with radiation preparedness, e.g. radiation protection in disaster medicine, contamination and so on, one has to deal with measurement equipment for radioactive and nuclear material. Therefore it is necessary to know about the performance and reliability of the used devices. Predominantly one has to rely on the information given by the manufacturer, also due to the fact that there is no international quality label available. It is therefore desirable to have a reliable third party test result concerning the devices. This is especially interesting when thinking of the procurement of new devices and the comparison to existing old equipment. Fraunhofer INT has a profound long-lasting experience in the assessment of measurement devices for the detection of nuclear and radioactive material. Due to this experience Fraunhofer INT has been invited to participate in the Illicit Trafficking Radiation Assessment Program (ITRAP+10). ITRAP+10 is a program initiated by the European Union and the United States to evaluate the performance of commercially available radiation detection equipment against consensus standards and to improve these standards. The ITRAP+10 effort accentuated the need to have accredited testing laboratories in the EU to perform testing against such standards in order to have reproducible test results, independent of the testing location. Therefore, the next step was to enable laboratories to work as testing locations. Initiated by the EU, this was carried out in ITRAP+10 Phase II in work package 2. Fraunhofer INT has conceived and built a test environment to perform the corresponding dynamic and static test measurements using neutron and gamma sources. The development of the testing facility as well as exemplarily tests of measurement devices are part of the present presentation. The INT testing facility can be used to qualify new devices as well as to test already deployed ones. Therefore a reliable comparison between different devices is possible. This will be especially helpful for the procurement of additional components when the presently used version is no longer available or a replacement with new equipment has to be done.