Year
1994
Abstract
The TAME (TAnk-MEasurement) laboratory is a facility which has been installed at the JRC Ispra site and is dedicated to a Safeguards programme for training and studying the problems related to the measurement of volume and mass of liquids in the nuclear industry. In cooperation with the IAEA and reprocessing plant measurement experts, inspection training and validation campaigns of volume/weight measurements for input, process and product tanks are being carried out. The laboratory is contained in an area reaching to 15 metres height and contains an annular input accountancy tank of 12.5m3 resting on 3 load cells, an output annular product tank of 250dm-', an output 'D' shaped product storage tank of 400dm3 suspended on tie rods connected to a balance and 3 large storage vessels of combined volume 14m3. In this report results are reported on the facility which has been designed to simulate real process conditions. In particular, TAME is dedicated to allow performance evaluation of instruments; compare the precision and accuracy achievable with different operating procedures; to study physical effects like evaporation, dead volumes; the use of tracers for tank calibrations; authentication of measurements, data and samples; data collection, treatment, interpretation and training exercises for the inspectorates and operators.