Effluent Monitoring for Nuclear Safeguards

A microprocessor-based instrument operates a continuous surveillance on effluents from a nuclear facility. It receives and evaluates pulses from two NaI detectors and a set of single-channel analyzers. It has self-diagnosing capability so that it takes actions not only when it recognizes excessive radioactivity but also when it ascertains some abnormal behaviour. Power failure procedure and automatic restart are provided. Operative constants such as alarm thresholds, times, and number of successive measurements are permanently stored in a read/write battery operated C-MOS memory. The program allows automatic succession of phases in a peculiar way and has a feature for loading an auxiliary program into RAMs.