The issue of permanent storage of nuclear waste is of great concern to today’s community. Nuclear power is in many ways a cheap and clean way of producing electric power. One of the big issues is how to permanently store the waste without affecting the surrounding environment. Trials are taking place all over the world to find suitable places for storage. In Sweden SKB (the Swedish Authority) is performing tests where the waste is being placed within solid rock deep down below sea level. A high quality rock was found on a small island called Aspo just outside Oskarshamn, where different technologies and methods for storing nuclear waste can be investigated.
The project is international and participants from nine different countries are co-operating which enable the scientists to share experiences and results from the research work.
In the rock a tunnel has been drilled with a length of 3600 meters and a depth of 460 meters. The waste is positioned at different positions in the tunnel and several parameters like pressure, flow, temperature, conductivity and strain have to be monitored and logged. The scientists need real time data accessible at different workstations for analysis and evaluations. SKB has high demands on accuracy, flexibility and easy access to data during the experiments. Datascan satisfies SKB’s demands. The system can also easily be expanded if more measurement channels are required. In all MSL have delivered 10 systems based on Orchestrator and Datascan 7000 series to this customer. The total number of channels is 1600, the majority of these being connected to Datascan. The measurement systems are all networked enabling the users to monitor and log all data on several workstations in different places in Sweden.