Eija Venelampi Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority – STUK, Finland VASARA – Finnish national source register International Workshop on National Sources Registry IAEA, Vienna March 20-23, 2017 Eija Venelampi Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority – STUK, Finland

General STUK has maintained information on radioactive sealed sources in electric form since the beginning of 1980’s The first applications were simple self-made databases planned for maintaining basic information on licenses and related individual sources Since then, several development phases have taken place leading to establishment of the current Regulatory Authority Information System called VASARA in 2009 VASARA is used for management of all regulatory processes and related data for the regulatory control of the use of radiation sources in Finland Eija Venelampi

VASARA in general House designed; technically created and maintained by an IT-company Integration to other STUK’s IT-systems (e.g. electronic document management and archiving) Includes information of safety licences, for example : Data about the licensee and the radiation practice: places of the use of radiation, radiation safety officer, radiation appliances and sources etc. Inspections: planning, observations, orders given, deadlines, links to the documents Management of applications and information of decisions, links to the documents Invoicing Reports Personal to-do lists: applications, deadlines… The national dose register is also included in VASARA Eija Venelampi

VASARA as the national source register The devices containing radiation sources are included in the safety licenses on the basis of the licencees’ applications Data on devices and sources are registered in VASARA VASARA includes data on all sealed sources exceeding the exemption level Extra data on high-activity sealed sources (HASS sources) is registered The aim is to gather data from cradle to grave Eija Venelampi

VASARA: Data on sources Serial number Manufacturer Radionuclide Activity and reference date Status (in use/in licensee’s storage/in supplier’s storage/in national long-term storage/returned abroad/lost/cleared) Latest leak test date Disposal plan High-activity sealed sources (HASS): physical and chemical characteristics Eija Venelampi

VASARA: Data on the device (in which the source is attached to) Serial number Status (same status as the source has) Purpose of use (e.g. level gauge or calibration device) Transportable device: yes/no Manufacturer Model Shield type Inspection interval Maintenance company Installation year Link to the latest inspection of the device (automatically created) Eija Venelampi

VASARA’s operations Sources can be searched from VASARA by different parameters: ID number, serial number or parts of it, radionuclide, activity (from…to), HASS source or not, status, data of the device etc. Sources/devices can be moved from a safety licence to another No sources are deleted from VASARA after decommissioning; the status is changed History data is gathered on every source Eija Venelampi

Development of VASARA Since its establishment, the VASARA system has been under continuous development and updating Automatic source activity updates based on the reference day and the half-life of the radionuclide will be added to VASARA At the moment, a major updating project (REKE3) is ongoing for developing new features including a specific interface for source suppliers so that they can insert all the source specific information into the system before the delivery to the user an interface for the licensees for viewing their licensing data including source specific information and for submitting applications, for example, for the inclusion of new sources to their license -> the licensee only gives the source identification and not all the source data which have already been inserted to the system by the supplier Eija Venelampi

Conclusions Experiences in Finland have shown that maintaining an up to date national register of sealed radioactive sources is essential in maintaining control over them for their whole lifetime However, any register is only as good as the validity of inserted data Different mechanisms for continuous verification of the validity of the data needs to be in place In addition to applications and other notifications from the users, these should include regular on-site inspections the cross-checking of supplier delivery notification data with the user application data as appropriate, different types of licensee-targeted source inventory campaigns (e.g. a request to verify the validity of a source register extract). Eija Venelampi