With the development of the dismantling industry in a context of ever-stricter requirements for risk mastery techniques, strengthened means of radiological monitoring are sought. For obvious safety reasons it is, for example, impossible to pilot a dismantling worksite without a good knowledge of the quality and the level of source terms. Source term control is constantly improving throughout the life cycle of nuclear facilities, particularly thanks to new requirements in the dismantling industry. Scenario preparation and nuclear waste management at the factory level, strictly governed by safety rules, provide fertile ground for methodological or technical innovations. This means new combinations of data or the development of special detectors to locate or characterise radioactive sources in hostile environments, and enhanced means for detector positioning, in other words robots. This paper's objective is to illustrate the logic of these developments as implemented for the characterisation of a source term in a pilot reprocessing facility on the CEA's Marcoule site.
First report from an advanced radiological inventory for a spent fuel reprocessing plant