1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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