Reference Materials and Quality Control: The Role of NBL

Accuracy of nuclear material inventories at a given site is of prime importance in efforts to safeguard those materials. Therefore, accurate and traceable measurement values constitute an important component of the nuclear materials control and accountability system. Measurement is a complex process providing many opportunities for introducing bias and imprecision. Chemical standards or reference materials constitute the segment of the measurement system that provides the important link that transfers measurement accuracy and comparability through the measurement process to the International System of Units (SI). Analytical laboratories have the responsibility to operate their measurement systems within a rigid quality assurance program to obtain meaningful results. Reference materials play an important role in process control and assessment of data quality. They are commonly used with statistical quality assessment procedures to establish the level of uncertainty in measurement data. When a measurement process is demonstrated to be in a state of statistical control, it implies the accuracy of the process. This presentation discusses how analytical laboratories such as New Brunswick Laboratory (NBL) produce Certified Reference Materials (CRMs) and how these CRMs are used by analytical laboratories to obtain meaningful measurement results for nuclear material accountability.