J. HOFMAN¹

¹Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Authority

Abstract:

The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear safety Agency (ARPANSA) manage and maintain seven CTBTO Radionuclide (RN) stations. Since December 2013 ARPANSA have been testing and operating liquid nitrogen (LN) cryogenic detector cooling systems. Following testing and operations at our Melbourne training and testing laboratory, the technology was successfully installed at Melbourne (RN04) and subsequently at Townsville (RN06) as a pilot field station. While RN04 performed well, the performance of the RN06 LN cooling system did not align with expectations. Over the last 12 months, ARPANSA staff have focussed efforts to improve the LN operations at RN06; the eventual success was the sum of numerous system-wide improvements. The challenges we encountered following the hardware implementation were not anticipated, however the lessons learnt understanding and overcoming these now underpin future ARPANSA LN system roll-outs. We believe these lessons could be similarly useful for other CTBTO operators considering LN cooling technologies.