Whenever people hear that you work for the Antarctic Division, they assume that you are a scientist, or an explorer!?! Well that has frequently been my experience. I am neither, with my job as station leader being mostly to manage the facilities and the team of people here. The exception to this however is the few times a month when I fill in at the ARPANSA lab - and wear the lab coat!
Nerd out alert. I'll keep it non-technical.
"ARPANSA??", you say? So did I, when I found out that I was volunteered for the role.
Australia is a signatory to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. To monitor potential nuclear testing activity there is a network of stations all over the world, measuring seismic, sound and air quality.
This network picked up and mapped the plume from the recent Fukishima melt down.
At Macca we have an air monitoring station. This is important as we have quite clean air down here, and there are not many inhabited land masses this far south on which to locate such a facility.
So we complete a daily filter change and measurements for ARPANSA.
Each day at 0900hrs, we take a filter paper which has filtered the air for 24 hours. We crush it into a small disk with a hydraulic crusher, then we put it into a decay cabinet for 24 hours to let much of the background radiation decay off. After this the filter disk is then placed into the detector for another 24 hours where it is tested to see if any radiation is detected that is likely to indicate a nuclear test. The results get sent to the international organisation in Vienna.
 |
Starting up the air filter after filter change over. Photo: Jacque Comery
|
 |
Removing the quality control source from the detector. Photo: Jacque Comery
|
 |
Loading the filter press. Photo: Jacque Comery
|
No comments:
Post a Comment