Everybody, my name is Jeff Ramondi. I'm a sales Director with Mirion, and I'd like to welcome you to our June webinar titled June 2024 Product Update, an exclusive look at spectroscopy and health physics innovations. I really want to thank everybody for taking time out of your busy day to join us today. Today we'll talk about portable spectroscopy and some new automation features. We'll talk about highly stable, accurate dose rate measurements of gamma and X-ray and beta radiation, and we'll also talk about next generation high throughput clearance monitoring and minimize measurement uncertainties and of course, a lot more. Before we get started, I'd like to go over some housekeeping items to make sure you're you, you see what you need to see and have access to all the information we have out there. At the top left of your screen, you'll see our Q&A chat box. You can use this chat box to ask questions at any time throughout the presentation. We'll have three different presentations today over the course of the next hour, and we'll have some questions after each session and then some at the end as well. Under the Q&A chat box, there is a resource list where you can find documents associated with the information being presented today. And you'll also see a contact us here which you can use to let us know that you'd like to talk to someone at Marriott. Also want to make sure that you sign up for our webinar mailing list so you can get early notification of future webinars. And also as you're viewing on the screen, you can adjust all your windows to make the the size of the field just how you'd like to see it during the webinar. And if for some reason you have a problem viewing the webinar, your best bet is to just refresh your browser. That should solve most problems. I also want to let you know that this webinar will be recorded and it will be available on Mirion.com/webinars for future viewing. So you can also view past webinars here. All the webinars we've conducted over the last several years are on that page, and there's also a link to that page in your resource section on your screen there. So that's pretty much what the the housekeeping items. I'd now like to introduce our three speakers for today. 1st, we have Dieter Paul Wells. He is our product line manager for High Purity germanium Detectors. Tobias Barr is our product man, product line manager for contamination and clearance monitors and Perry White, who is our product line manager and application support person for Telemetry solutions. So with that, I'll hand it over to Tobias, who's going to get us started here. Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. So welcome everybody. I'm excited to start this webinar by presenting some innovative solutions on clearance monitoring, in particular when there are high throughput requirements. So as an introduction, when do we use clearance monitors? The main application is the release of material from regulatory control. This, for example, are cases in decommissioning of nuclear facilities, but also in nuclear labs, operational nuclear facilities, also radiopharma applications, etcetera. These releases of material from regulatory control are typically strictly regulated and on an international level, the guiding regulations are the IAEA and the Euro tome for European countries regulations. And these are typically implemented in national laws and national regulations with however fairly similar clearance levels which are based on these common international regulations. And one important requirement from that is that clearance typically has to done in a nuclide specific activity assessment because the clearance limits are basically defined separately for each nuclide. And in the clearance monitors which we cover in this presentation, we are talking about systems where we want to manage complex nuclide vectors, but we typically know them in advance. This is typically done in a separate pre step, for example by gamma spectras or typically by gamma spectroscopy measurement, where we determine the nuclei director of your two sample and then measure large volumes of waste for clearance. Why is that important? You see here on the right hand side an example from a real nuclear power plant being under decommissioning where it's estimated that the total waste is around 200,000 tons. And you see that most of that is typically being able to be free released and only the smallest portion of that is really radioactive. And that's of course it's important because radioactive material, disposal of radioactive material is expensive. Just as a very rough figure in Germany, average pricing is around €35,000 per cubic meter. Of course much more dependent on activity and and type of type of waste. So just as a rough estimate, but the message here is disposal of radioactive waste is expensive. And of course also radioactive waste repositories, the volume and there's limited and we don't want to put non radioactive waste in a radioactive waste repository. At Miriam, we have a long term experience with such type of clearance monitors. We have over 170 clearance monitors of our type RTM 6 serious in operation, some for over 20 years in many countries. And all of these have been extensively validated and approved by authorities in many, in many case many places all over the world. I want to highlight one round Robin test which was conducted in 2018 I under the leadership of V KTA, which is a organization in Germany yeah responsible for dismantling of nuclear power plants. And they basically caught this basically confirmed again the suitability of the clear. These type of clearance monitors for clearance measurements were done with the with the dummy crate which you see in the middle in the in the center of the slide. And basically it showed that all monitors correctly alarmed to contamination. However, it also indicated that you have in most cases, a certain level of overestimation, as you can see here on the right. And this is in many cases on the level of up to 2030%, something like that. And this basically was the starting point to drive some important improvements of our clearance monitor family throughout the past years. And most importantly to significantly try to significantly reduce the uncertainties and in particular unnecessary conservativeness is to basically avoid that non radioactive material has to be put to radioactive waste repository in the end. And we have a few technology principles which we employed in our monitors to do that. The first one is spectroscopy based on plastic scintillators and we'll come back to that in a few slides. The second one is we have significantly improved our leading nuclide correlation technology. Leading nuclide correlation technology is a technology which we use to manage complex nuclide vectors. So in particular when you have many nuclides which you want to do a nuclide specific assessment, but to avoid having to calibrate for each of these nucleolides is basically managed by this nucleotide correlation leading nuclei correlation technology. We have significantly improved that, in particular taking into account better the self shielding of the object and also taking the density and mass corrections of the object into. Also we have changed to using MCMP based geometry calibrations. Conventional approach is more to use dummy based calibrations. This is a very, yeah, helpful approach because we are much more accurate with these Monte Carlo simulations compared to conventional dummies. And we can also are more flexible and can adapt it more to customer specific situations on site. And also of course connectivity, remote connection has been improved. We're using right now a state-of-the-art Lighthouse user system with Windows 10 operating system. Another topic which is always to be considered our treatment of inhomogeneities. And in our clearance monitors, we are now working on an improved treatment of inhomogeneities for the larger clearance monitors based on a quasi yeah tomographic assessment based on the 24 detectors which we have available. This will become available soon, so stay tuned for that. That brings me to the introduction of the new clearance monitor family which we have. So we have as a smallest product the RTM 66 to 36 with 36 liter measurements chamber, so suitable for smaller items and then the RTM 66 to 300 on the bottom. This has already been introduced in 2020. So we did gather quite some operational experience with that product already has 307 liters measurement chamber. So for intermediate sized objects fairly useful. Then we have the larger brother which is the RTM 66 to 460 and at the bottom the RTM 66 to 460 C that comes with the conveyor and is then suitable for larger and heavier objects. So in comparison the RTM 66 to 300 for example is designed for loads of up to 150 litre, but you basically 150 kilogram. But you practically have to load the equipment manually or with simple loading ads. The RTM 6/6 Q460C is then designed for up to 500 kilogram and with automatic conveyor to manage heavier loads. And the working horse for decommissioning is the RTM 644 smart with almost 2 cubic meter measurement chamber. So that typically measures EPAL crates, boxes, larger drums, etcetera, has 24 large volume gamma plastic scintillators with the spectroscopic readout throughput of up to 16 tons per hour. So here we're really having the high throughput and a remarkable precision of down to 34 Becker roll for cobalt 60 and 180 seconds. So just to put that in perspective, typical clearance limit is at the level of .1 Becker roll per gram. If you divide the 34 Becker roll by let's say 102 hundred, 300 kilograms, something like that, which is the typical load, you see that you get into ranges of 10 to the -4 to 10 to the -3 backer roll program. So we are really a couple of order of magnitudes better than the release limits, which basically allows to do the clearance in very fast time time. Yeah, at very fast times, typical measurement time is around 30 seconds or can be even faster than that. We have many options available. Common is for example, integration container or cameras or additional analysis software, etcetera. Last but not least, I wanted to dive a little bit to say a few words about the technology principle of our smart technology. The basis here is that we use spectroscopy with plastics and elation detectors, and you see here one such spectrum. And as you realize, that's not comparable with spectroscopy done by germanium detectors or sodium iodine detectors. So we cannot do an identification of nuclides with plastic scintillation detectors. But you see that it is sufficient to distinguish reliably cobalt 60 which is the red line from for example cesium 137 which is the green spectrum and barium which is the yellow spectrum and the blue is a typical background spectrum. So it is yeah, fairly reliable and fast to distinguish such type of of energy levels. And this helps for a couple of applications. The first one is we can automatically validate the nuclide vector. So basically the system checks automatically that the declared loop light vector is consistent with the measured nuclide vector. And if not, it performs an alarm and can even make some recommendations for which required vector to choose instead. Also we have an improved compensation of norm and background, improved energy correction of the LNC factors thanks to the energy resolution of the detector itself. And another important item is the the quality assurance. So this having the Spectra available allows to perform very fast quality assurance to validate basically that all acquisition chains of the system are still functioning correctly. We also have our most advanced background treatment system here treating also correctly the the self, self absorption from the measurement object itself as well as fluctuations during the measurement process. And to to be able to recover from that very fast. As I said, it's based on our most advanced Lighthouse software and implements, of course, ISO 11/9 to 9, the relevant international standards. That was just an overview. If you need more information in the resources section, you can download some spec sheets. And of course, you can also contact us and we can talk about that in more detail as needed. So that's what I wanted to show here and I'm curious if there are any questions. Thanks for that. We do have a couple questions. The first one, these clearance monitors are all gamma and therefore ratio based detection systems. Are there any clearance systems designed to monitor for alpha? That is an excellent question. It is true that these monitors are all designed for a direct gamma measurement. What we do have as well is beta measurement systems in some cases. So we also have beta gamma combinations of measurement systems. We also have for specific applications conveyor based clearance monitor or conveyor based monitor which can be used for clearance application with heater, but that depends always on the exact situation. For alpha. It's it's much more complicated and we do not have at this point in time really like a box counting monitor for for for clearance of alpha. The the free, the the the range of alpha is simply too low for that to perform reliable clearance based on alpha. But typically where you have alpha, you typically also have gamma particles. So it would be more an indirect measurement to basically detect the gamma particles instead of instead of the alpha. Tobias, we have another question. We have a few Kronos monitors. What is the difference between these RTM monitors and the Kronos? Yeah, also an excellent question. So, yes, we do also have the Kronos monitors. The Kronos monitors are contamination monitors. So the primary purpose of the Kronos monitors or primary application is they are used at the exit of a controlled area next to an Argos monitor to monitor for contamination, typically of items which are brought temporarily inside a controlled area. So these Kronos monitors are typically calibrated for a single nuclide, for example, Cesium 137. They can also manage nuclide vectors. But in clearance applications, you typically have more complex nuclide vectors. And there's kind of the limitations of of classical contamination monitors that when you want to handle complex nuclide vectors, you would need to calibrate the contamination monitor for each and every nuclide, for example, which is something which, which is at some cases not not practical anymore. If you think about that, you have many nuclides or some nuclides may be difficult even to measure. Some nuclides may have short lifetime and may not be even easy to, to, to calibrate. So in this case, the clearance monitors have the clear advantage that the monitor itself knows its efficiency to the different nuclides. And we have we have a long list of conventions additional nuclear conventionally occurring nuclides which are pre parameterized in the system. And the user can basically select his own nuclide vector, create his own nuclide vector from this list. Yes. Another main difference is that the Kronos monitors are typically intended for items which can be loaded by hand or at least with simple loading aids. The clearance monitors we go to much larger objects, heavier objects, RTM 64 fours for example, with two cubic meters and can load it was up to one ton. So there we have automatic conveyor systems which are basically used in in when you want to do, for example, decommissioning with high throughput and high volumes. Thanks, Tobias. We're, excuse me, we're going to jump to the next session. I know there are more questions coming in. We'll have a session at the end to take on more questions. But to make sure we get all three sessions and we'll jump to Perry White right now to talk about the IC3 Iron Chamber. And we did finally get all the updates that. Were can you just start over? You were muted. When you were speaking, I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's one thing. I did forget to unmute myself before I started. We should have talked about that. Yes, I'm sorry. Once again, my name is Perry White. I work on the health physics side of Mirion and do a lot of the product line management and application support for the handheld instruments. So I'm here to discuss our IC3 ion chamber. It's something that we've actually been working on with our ROTAM partners for several years now, getting voice at customer feedback, trying to make something that we knew would be new and better for the industry. They've taken the feedback, they've made the changes, and so we should get our first first articles for demo beta testing the end of this month and we'll officially release this at our connect meeting at the end of July. The biggest thing to remember that other than the, you know, the standard use of an ion chamber, we made sure we added the functionality to allow the connectivity of it to a lot of our other systems. And that's going to makes it a great advantage for us to be able to use it not only for just standard surveys, but for other applications as well. So these are the basic features of it. It is a it's a digital device. It's got a very, very large color display to it. It's battery operated. It's it is a vented ion chamber, not a pressurized ion chamber. One of the key features to it is that the electrometer is sealed, or I should say the components in the electrometer have a specific ceiling on them, a ceramic base ceiling that prevents them from being affected in high humidity areas and anybody that deals with ion chambers. The reason for the dead skin is because the ion chambers, especially vented ion chambers, when moisture gets into the chamber itself, it causes erratic behavior of the ion chamber and that requires the site to bake the the moisture out before it can be used and change their skin out all the time. This prevents all of that maintenance because no desk and is required for this. It has the capability, like most island chambers of reading pulse X-rays fairly well. This one can read them all the way down to 50 nanoseconds. And again, like everything else, when I talk about reading pulse X-rays, we're not talking about reading dose rates and pulse X-rays or reading dose from pulse X-rays. It just got a wider range than the majority of the iron chambers that goes from the .1 milligram to 100 R per hour. Basically it's a dual range iron chamber like most of the other older ones were as well. We do allow you to store memory directly to it or you can actually send the data out with the worm technology and be sent and stored in our telemetry monitoring programs. As I mentioned, it's a large color display. For those people that actually have our Telepole 2, it's the exact same display and the menu options are very, very similar. So it has many of the same functions and the options are exactly pretty much the same as a Telepole 2. So for training purposes wise, we have the telepole. It's easy to implement and understand how the ion chamber is going to work as well. Again, I mentioned we have both dose rate and dose measurements and of course there's a beta wind in it. There's also an alarm. So if you open the beta window and it's not all the way open or not all the way closed, the ion chamber will beep at you and tell you open or close it what you want to do. Right now it's halfway open. So it's interesting to have that because it does kind of remind you to make sure you have it either open or closed. So I mentioned the first part of this, the the connectivity. We did build in a lot of connectivity to it. The biggest difference we have with our stuff is the ability to use our telemetry system, which is our worm radios. Most nuclear plants, well all nuclear plants have our telemetry system already out there. So this fits right in with that existing system because it has a built in radio capability to it. This allows you to be able to use the iron chamber and send the data out straight, your telemetry software program where it's stored and updated. It also has the it's connected and calibrated to software or RMBC software. So it has AUSB connection. The other use of that USB connection is if you want to use it for a long term area monitor, you basically can power it through the USB. You can build a little stand for it and I can't even see it. You can build a stand for it, plug it in the bottom of it and set it out there and use it for an area monitor as well. It has not only the worm capability, but it will also have a VLE capability. It'll use the same VLE protocol as a RDS 32, so it will work directly with the RDS 32 app that we currently have. You will have to actually replace the the worm radio with the BLE radio. It's a in or type of situation on that, but most people don't use them both at the same time. And not only will it work with our app because it is BLE and it is using the same protocol, it will automatically connect straight to our Connect Studio software, which again can be pushed from Connect Studio to your other primary telemetry software as well. The last thing we actually will have on board, it's actually a separate built in autumn is our ultra wide band board, which is makes a connection to our RTLS system or location tracking system called Orion. The Orion software allows you to basically track and not only do you store the actual data from the ion chamber on your telemetry, but it stores the exact location and XY coordinates of whatever area that's being used in. So that gives you not only the the readings, but you can make really, really great heat maps on it. And if you're doing surveys, you never have to write anything down. You just walk around with the meter and the software records all the data and the location the readings have came from. So it makes it very, very convenient for monitoring systems with this. And the last thing I really wanted to go on and you know, probably not great to to call ion chambers out, but everybody knows which ones are our competitors anyway. So we do actually look through and and try to make a comparison on how well IR and chamber is going to stack up to the other ion chambers. And as you see, there's a lot of green on the the Marriott IC three side. We do have certainly better features, better capabilities. A lot of ones were similar or the same and very few cases are other ion chambers any better for us. The biggest thing for us obviously it's a new product and then bring a new product into the market where everybody already has Ludlums or the the RO twos or 20s, whatever the case might be. So getting back into that market when we've not had a rely on chain for a while is our challenge. So we did try to make it certainly better than the other ion chambers to be able to give us that ability to get into the market and that's it for it. Is there any questions? Well, thanks, Perry. We certainly do have some questions. Here's the first one. What is the energy range for the IC3? Yeah, absolutely. It will go all the way up to well, it'll go up to six Mev. It'll go down from I think it's 40 Kev to six Mev. It's I think it's up to like 15% at six Mev. But it's a fair, it's an ion chamber, so it's got a fairly flat energy response. We're doing the actual. So ROTAM did the initial ANSI testings and we're getting the third party ANSI testing done now. So it'll probably be the end of the year before we have it. At that point in time, I'll actually have a a good energy response curve to show everybody. Great. Can an IC? Can the IC3 measure lower than one micro sievert per hour? Background level is usually lower than one micro sievert per hour. So ion chambers are not typically I'm saying a ventadiene chamber is not typically designed to see very, very low dose rates. So it would be let's see, it should see right around let's see one micro server, it's 100 micro R.E.M. .1 yeah. So it should see down to 1 micro sievert. But at that, at that range, it's very, very slow response. That is a very low end of its actual capability. A couple more questions since things are going quickly. Is the IC3 capable of being calibrated by third party suppliers or is it proprietary calibration hardware? Software. Oh no, yeah, it it can be calibrated by anybody. The we provide the the software is on our on our website. It simply requires you to have the actual software to calibrate it. Nothing proprietary with it. Great. Thanks, Perry. Once again, we're going to move to the third speaker. We, I do see some more questions coming in and we will answer as many as we can at the end of the segment. All right. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Perry. So now we're going to jump over to Dieter Paul Wells to talk about gamma spectroscopy. Yeah. Thank you, Jeff. So my turn, I'm very happy and excited to talk about in situ germanium spectroscopy with automation features. And more specifically actually what I want to discuss in this part are actually new continuous spectroscopic monitoring features on the AEGIS spectrometer. Now both solutions exist already within medium. So I will first give a short introduction for both products starting with AEGIS germanium spectrometer. So AEGIS is an all in one portable multi use germanium gamma spectroscopy device for lab quality readings in the field. And with the all in one, I mean that it's not just a germanium detector, but it is really a full detector system in one package. So it's not only detector and preamplifier, but it also houses the high voltage module, the MCA, the cooler electronics and it has also an integrated battery package for autonomy in the field. On top of that, it's with the help of the two handles on top of the unit, one person can easily transport the unit from 1 setup to the other. And because of these two features, it can be deployed as a multi use device as illustrated in the picture on the left hand side of this slide. And of course, it's germanium gammas spectrometer. So you have very good energy resolutions. It's maybe not as good as standard germanium detectors, but it's really close. So you can deploy it in the lab as well because of the good energy resolution performance. But principally it's designed for use in the field. Now in terms of control of the unit, the way the Aegis is controlled, it's through a PC or a tablet that is connected to the Aegis unit, either through a wired lump connection, either through a Wi-Fi connection. And there are basically 2 user interfaces to control the Aegis unit. The first one it's the Aegis dashboard UI and you can see a screenshot of that interface at the top left in this slide. And that's basically what you need for state of health monitoring. So in the example in the screenshot, you see, you see that everything is on in green. So this is in good health. And in addition, you use this interface also for the maintenance and setup functions. Now, whenever you want to acquire Spectra and analyze those Spectra, which is of course the ultimate goal of the germanium spectrometer, then you need to run in Genie software. And that Genie software, it's running on the PC or the tablet itself. And what you can do with the Genie software is, and that's what has been happening so far is that you can sample essays only. So the only way to do measurements is only Start Stop sequences, usually in the manual way. Now the title of this session was automated features. And that's where the data analyst platform comes in. And the data analyst, this is also a known product. And what the data analyst does is it adds a feature to existing detector solutions. So whether it's scintillator detector, a CZT detector or a germanium detector system, by linking this PC data analyst platform system to this detector system, what you enable is a continuous or a triggered spectroscopic monitoring platform. So with the continuous spectroscopic monitoring, we mean that you predefine a certain data collection interval and within that interval you collect the spectrum and you continue acquiring Spectra back-to-back one, yeah, Spectra one after each other and you analyze those. And that way you can monitor nook light activity trends as a function of time in the triggered mode. What you do there is there you use a software command or a hardware trigger to trigger the start of the spectrum and that goes can go on and on and on again to measure certain nuclide activity trends. And these are then the automated gamma spectroscopic sampling data that you can acquire. And once you have set it up and activate it, this will run just autonomously and you acquire the data automatically and what you can monitor or the Nook light activities and moreover, you can have alerting. So based on preset thresholds, you can get automated alerts as well. OK, let me move on. So we have those both existing products and what we did now is that we combined it into one system, which is the AEGIS together with the data analyst platform. So what we are planning to release relatively soon now is actually an Aegis spectrometer which will have the CSM features embedded on the system itself. And the CSM features, these are exactly a copy of the data analyst platform. So everything you were able to do with the data analyst, you will be able to do with the Aegis spectrometer. Now of course advantages of the Aegis now is it's already an all in one system. Having it embedded on the Aegis, it will make it a very versatile and flexible system. And together with the RTC option, enabling back shielding, the laboratory detection efficiency and energy resolution performance, yeah, you can deploy it for specific situations. And of course, the Aegis is designed to be used in the field with the IP65 ingress protection rating and the family's design, which of course is needed for easy decontamination and help preventing internal contamination. So if you look to CSM has certain benefits and that's now combined with the Aegis benefits. So benefits of the CSM is instead of having to collect, process and count samples, that's labor you don't need anymore. So whenever you can automate that, you can make use of the data analyst platform and it will lower operational costs, it will reduce those exposures to operators and it will reduce the safety risk. Obviously the results are available immediately. You don't have to wait for all the processing in case of sample measurement. And it gives continuous results with no gaps between sample extractions, as illustrated also by the figure at the bottom. And it gives frequent results, allowing early detection of changes or abnormal conditions. So it makes you your system much more efficient and responsive. And of course, with the Aegis, you have the high germanium sensitivity. You can deploy the system in industry environments and possibly contaminated areas without risk of internal contamination. It's a highly versatile system, so you can easily change location or setup, and you can also access more difficult areas like think about heights. You don't have to worry about a lot of cabling and setup. So that's clearly an advantage for the CSM embedded on the Aegis as well. And then as a last slide, as an example for an application, it's well known that in NPPS primary circuit monitoring is critical for reactive exploitation. And this is traditionally done through sample taking, more recently the CZT. Has been used combined with the data analyst platform, so that automated already a lot and the CCT is sensitive enough for the highly active primary circuit, but there are also needs identified for secondary circuit monitoring And there, yeah, the Aegis can come in thanks to the higher sensitivity and the easy to install and deploy system. So with that, yeah, I want to end my session. I'm happy to take any questions here. Hey Dieter, thanks for that session. If I look through some of the questions here, what is the battery time of Aegis? Yeah. So the Aegis has two internal batteries installed and in normal conditions when the unit is fully cooled down, the autonomy is let's say over two hours. And of course the batteries are hot swappable. So with the Aegis system, you're not only getting the two internal each batteries, but you also get two each spare batteries and you can hot swap the batteries for an infinite number of of times, let's say. So you can keep on working continuously in in that mode, there is there is an external battery charger that's also in the package. You can charge the battery in one hour or the batteries in in one hour while the others or discharging at during two hours. Great, next question, do I still need Genie software to control the Aegis unit? Yes, so. Yeah, that's the question. OK. So, yes, so with the new former update that we are planning to release this data analyst, these data analyst features will become available. But obviously for any applications where you want to measure in a sample essay mode, the genie will still be required. And for any layers products as well, like Apex Gamma, Yeah. Great. Next question, I already have an Aegis unit. Can I upgrade my Aegis system so that I can use the continuous spectroscopic monitor features? Yes. So as I mentioned, the CSM features will be part of an upcoming firmware release and the firmware will be freely available on our million websites. You can find it through a link on the Aegis product page. So it's a matter of downloading the firmware and then upgrading the firmware on the Aegis units, following the instructions in the manual and the release notes. So it's important to follow those for any assistance. I can always reach out to your local service representative, of course. Yep. OK, another question, after Aegis is turned off, how long is the rest time to run back the aegis? So I'm thinking this may be, you know, referring to maybe a thermal cycle time, you know, you need to thermal cycle. Yeah, yeah, that, that's also how I'm into interpreting this, this question. So as opposed to our standard germanium detectors, we are using ultra high Bakram technology for the Aegis Christ that which means that it doesn't matter how long the system has been warming up, you can directly cool down the system again. You don't have to wait till it's warmed up to to room temperature again, so there's no issue in in that regards with the Aegis spectrometer. Great. Next question, are you able to discuss the cooling times on the Aegis and how that affects operation? Yes. So that's how long does it take to? Cool it down. Yeah, yeah. So the cool it's so an important remark for the cooldown is that you need to cool it down in an environment which is not too warm and that means you need to cool it down in environments which are 25° C or less. I always forget what the degrees Fahrenheit is corresponding to 25, but it's something in South 75 ish degrees Fahrenheit. But whenever you do that, you need to be able to cool it down for sure within 12 hours. And of course if you want to deploy the unit, it's of course important that you plan up front to have it cool down in time like the evening before you want to deploy it. So if you want to use it morning after, it's important to cool it down the evening before. Yeah, sure. Great. Those are the questions on spectroscopy. I'd like to throw a couple poll questions out to the crowd and then we'll also take out there are a few more questions. Go back to a couple of the other presentations that we'll cover so I can pull this up. So which of the products covered in today's webinar interests you the most? Choose all that, apply. There it goes. I think everybody can see that. So if you don't mind taking that quick poll, I'll give you just a few seconds if you're willing to answer that question. All right, and I'll jump to one more poll question. Would you like a representative to contact you to learn more about this product? You know, and you can just select AA or B for yes or no. OK, let's go back to some of the questions we didn't get to earlier. So two questions on the IC 3 Perry during during Mirion Connect durability plastic seem to be an issue. Have improvements been made to the case structure? So the, the, the biggest issue we had were the, the, the battery entrance area. And they did actually improve that. That was the one little piece we saw that actually had broken. As far as the, the, the case in general, I mean, there's a, there's always a, a premise or a supposition that the metal cases are, are more durable, but you're really not concerned with the case, you're concerned with the electronics inside. And so that's what they really focus on is making sure that when you drop the instrument, the electronic inside would still function and, and work correctly. Although this, the plastic case is actually very durable. We, we've actually, the regular case itself, we beat up quite a bit and doesn't really take any damage. But we will get our, like I said, we'll have the new ones in by the end of this month. And certainly you guys don't Jim 'cause he likes to really beat things up bad. So he's going to smack it around a lot. We'll all be doing our own testing with it as well, so we'll see how durable it is. But it did fix the one part which was the battery flat for the entrance of the batteries. Thanks, Perry. There was mention of regulatory. This is for you, Tobias. With respect to the clearance monitors, it was mention of regulatory clearance standards. For example, in Germany, the US doesn't really have a a uniform clearance standard by regulation. So can you explain what the sensitivity of these monitors are? For example, you know 5000 DPM and associated you know count times. Yes, that's an excellent question and very well observation. Yes, of course in US it's more common to to measure with Cesium 137 at 5000 DPM clearance limit. 5000 DPM correlates to 83 backer rolls. So if you look in the spec sheets which are in the download section, you can see that all these clearance monitors meet the 5000 DPM or 83 backer roll for cesium 137 within the count time. Well, you, you can see it on the second page of of few seconds up to a few minutes. Important consideration here is for the for the RTM 644 for example, the larger clearance monitors they are, they are being used also in in North America for that application. And there you really reach reach these limits in in 1-2 minutes to three minutes typical, typical duration measurement time for the smaller applications. When you use calibration for a single nuclide only and basically declare the release limit only for Cesium 137, then we typically recommend rather to go with a Kronos monitor. The Kronos 1/4 or 11 monitors which have basically the required functionality though the RTM clearance monitors are either used or larger heavier objects where you need a conveyor system or for situations where you need to have complex and client vectors. This can also be situation in lapse but in in in US. But otherwise I agree that most customers who have smaller items measuring the 5000 DPM, excuse me 137 then you would rather go with a chromosome 1. Great. Perry, a couple more questions on the IC3. How does it operate without the use of a desiccant? So the the way the ion chamber works, it has electrometer board, which is what actually takes the the readings from the chamber and makes them into a signal you can read. The issue on all electronic boards is that they use these resistors, these glass resistors, and they do tend to be hydroscopic anyways. They do tend to be affected by moisture and so when the moisture gets into those, they basically just cause erratic response on the board which takes a stable reading and makes it erratic response to go to the actual meter. So the the difference is that ours actually have a A a seal on it. That's not the glass seal. It's a different type of sealant on the electrometer board that prevents the moisture intrusion and therefore vents any kind of erotic behaviors. Great, how does it work with pulsed X-rays? Yeah. So like I mentioned in the in the thing it everybody thinks about it can read pulse X-rays, but nothing really reads rates in pulse X-rays. It just reads those. But it does read the dose correctly like most ion chambers. They're all going to be fairly similar in the fact that they can basically read the dose from the pulse X-rays a little bit at a time. So this one has been tested down to the nano carry range, which is about as low as what's the current X-ray pulse X-ray devices are using right now. So shouldn't have any issues with that. Just be aware like like most ion chambers, it is 2 ranges. And so when you're using pulse X-rays or going to measure pulse X-rays, you always start on the highest range of it because in a pulse X-ray field, if you have a dual range ion chamber, which most are, they're not going to switch based on the pulses. So you do have to start out on the correct range. And this makes it very easy to go to the high range and then drop it back down to low range if you do. Another question on the IC 3 Perry, is type testing done for the IC3? No, Nope. It's the only the internal type testing by ROTAM is done. The external 1 won't be done till the probably Q3 this year or Q4 this year. That's when it's expected, but it will have full third party ANSI testing at that point in. Time got you. I think it's another question if it was a Mirion or a Rotem product. Oh it it is manufactured by Rotem. We just, we do spend a lot of time working with Rotem to make sure that the the instruments that we do take are QR specifications. Most of our sales team is from the power plant. So we're used to beating things up and we know how things get handled in a nuclear power plant. So we try to make sure they work correctly and are going to be usable for the people to use them. Sure. Tobias, a question here. We have an old RTM 661 and RTM 644 in operation. Can we upgrade these to the new technology? Yes, another excellent question. Yes, of course we have large installed base of RTM 661 and RTM 644 and other RTM 6 serious products. These can be upgraded that what is typically upgraded is the software and the computer and potentially some electronics components. So we typically upgrade them to the state-of-the-art Lighthouse software, modern computer, Windows operating system, modern connectivity and so on. Typically we do not upgrade the detectors because most of the time the detectors are still functional and it would be economically also almost not viable to exchange all detectors. And this has kind of some limitations. So features which are presented which are related to software only will be available also as part of an upgrade package or upgrade program. However, some of the features which are for example related to the spectroscopic read out, those are only available for for new equipment. And typically when you want to exchange all detectors, the replacement by a new product can be can be economically similar, similar situation. OK. We have another question on the RTM units. Are they able to detect uranium 2:35 and 2:38? Good question as well. So I think U 238 is primarily alpha emitter if I'm not mistaken, very low energy gammas. I think that will is not within the scope of an RTM unit. Uranium 235 I think has low energy gamma at around 100 something Kev that is detectable. So the default low energy range is kind of around 80 Kev. So everything above that is detectable or that's kind of the borderline. So you 235 would be detectable, but definitely MD as wouldn't be for example as good As for 60, that's for sure. Great, thanks Tobias. Why? Why don't you use germanium in addition to the plastic ones for qualitative validation of the radionuclides? What about the deconvolution if there is a mix of gamma emitters? That's another excellent questions, very good questions today. So that is indeed something which we do have available as an option and which can be done and which we have also done already in the past to basically integrate a germanium detector inside the RTM 644 smart. The advantage of that is that we obtain at the same time a very accurate energy spectrum is very high resolution. Also we utilize the heavy latch shielding which the RTM 644 typically has normally or many cases we have 75 millimeter latch shielding. So that provides fairly good background situation also for the for the germanium detector. The other consideration is however, that the measurement times of the clearance monitor with plastic detectors is typically much faster than the time you need to acquire a real a reasonable spectrum as a germanium detector. So for the clearance monitors we mentioned already, we we have measurement times of a few seconds up to 30 seconds are pretty common. That is typically not sufficient to require apps to acquire yeah, accurate spectrum with germanium detector you need much longer time for that. And that's typically the question if you if you integrate the germanium detector in the clearance monitor, it would basically reduce the throughput which you have. So another alternative could also be or what some, some users also do is to have it as two separate equipments really the clearance monitor with fast measurement time for the hard throughput. And if if you do not obtain a clearance recommendation, then in the second step to take this box to an NDA system, a germanium based NDA system where you can do a much higher measurement time, measurement time, more higher accuracy, but you do not limit the throughput of the of the equipment. So these are the two alternatives. But we also have integration of germanium detector in the clearance monitors available as an option. This has been done already. Great. Well, thanks Tobias. And that kind of brings us to our full hour. I really want to appreciate everybody. Thank you. Thank everybody for attending today. We really appreciate you participating in our webinar. I want to thank our three speakers, Perry, Dieter and Tobias for presenting today. Just one last note, as you exit the presentation here, you'll see a pop up link to our website to register from Mirion Connect. It's coming up quickly at the end of July. I would love to have you join us there at the end of July. So thank you once again for attending and have a great day. _1732894661748