Overview

Photograph of a workstation setup in a Kinectrics laboratory

Nuclear facilities produce wastes in a variety of forms including radioactive solids, radioactive liquids, and combinations of the two. All these waste forms must be appropriately managed to achieve cost-effective and safe storage or disposal.

Establishing exactly what the waste materials are is the essential first stage of determining the optimum waste management approach. Waste characterization does this by establishing what chemical and radiological hazards are present and in what physical form.

We have a fully licensed facility capable of handling radioactive, hazardous, and mixed wastes enabling us to provide detailed, quality-assured, characterizations using alpha spectrometry, proportional flow beta counting, and proprietary methods for other isotopes.

Why Us?

  • Extensive Experience

    We have been performing characterization work since the 1980s, successfully completing projects for a wide range of clients including research reactors, CANDU stations, and several international nuclear facilities.

  • Customized Characterization Programs

    Specific programs are designed to meet your individual needs by reviewing methodologies, conducting gap assessments, identifying characterization priorities, and utilizing scaling factors, before undertaking the analysis.

  • Comprehensive Services

    Our team can confidently advise on treatment, management, transport, and disposal options for radioactive waste. In addition, we can support difficult-to-measure (DTM) radionuclide detection and scaling factor development.

  • State-Of-The-Art Facilities

    We have one of the very few privately-owned regulator-licensed laboratories that is equipped with the instruments necessary for both radiological and non-radiological analysis and characterization.

  • Developing Proprietary Techniques

    Having already developed techniques for measuring Be-10, Cl-36, Zr-93, Tc-99, and I-129 in waste our radiochemists stand ready to develop techniques for other isotopes.

  • Difficult-to-Measure Radionuclide Detection

    Specialist equipment allows us to analyze many difficult-to-measure isotopes and where we can't analyze we use scaling factors to establish quantities by measuring associated markers.