News

The winners of this year’s six NDA Group Supply Chain Awards were announced to a packed audience in Manchester yesterday. The Minister’s SME award is selected from all submissions and recognises the value, flexibility and innovation that SMEs bring to the mission. It was presented to Viridian Consultants for their ViridiScope® project entitled ‘Deployment of an innovative portable laser-sampling tool’. Professor Kym Jarvis, MD, Viridian Consultants says: ‘We are delighted to receive such a...

The challenge was to sample a pond wall from above, in a situation where it was not possible to use a robot. The answer was an extendable pole that was lowered down to the sampling point. The question was ‘how will we know the sampling head is in contact with the wall when we are sampling?’ The answer is easy. The sampling head has proximity sensors designed to control the laser power for safety reasons: if the head moves away from the surface, the laser cuts out. So, unless the head is in...

Characterisation experts from site licence companies, the NDA and representatives from contractors working for the nuclear industry attended demonstrations of our new tool on site at Sellafield and in NNL’s Rig Hall, Workington.  We were delighted to show them how we can collect concrete with our laser sampling tool, ViridiScope®, and, within minutes, produce a solution suitable for analysis by inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). This latest of our in situ analysis...

ViridiScan® is a highly innovative instrumental solution for on-site in-situ materials characterisation.  Our novel approach uses a laser to remove surface material, which is transported to a sample collection pod in a safe area, located up to 20 metres away, where it will be processed and analysed in-situ by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry – a powerful tool for isotopic analysis. This will avoid the need to transport samples across site or even off site for analysis,...