Partner Laboratories

The División de Espectroscopía Atómica, Universidad de Cádiz is a long-term collaborator of the Environmental Geosciences research group at the University of Basel in the use of Pu isotopes for assessing soil erosion. This division has scientific instrumentation for atomic emission and mass detection techniques, using argon plasma obtained through magnetic coupling as the source of ions and radiation. For measuring ^239+240Pu isotopes, they use a Thermo X7 quadrupole ICP-MS system.

Labor Spiez is Switzerland’s Federal Institute for nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) Protection. As a division of the Federal Office for Civil Protection, Labor Spiez deals with the dangers of NBC events and their possible effects on a scientific and technical level. It collaborates with national and international organizations, to contribute to global efforts in countering NBC threats. As such, it has expertise on mass spectrometric techniques as well as instrumental and radiochemical analytical methods for the precise measurement of radioactive isotopes in a huge range of materials.

The Laboratoire Souterrain de Modane (LSM) is an underground laboratory affiliated with the National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics of the CNRS and the University of Grenoble Alpes (UGA). It is located 1,700 m below the summit of Mt. Fréjus in France, which allows for the measurement of ¹³⁷Cs activity under ultra-low background radioactivity conditions. With the newly acquired SAGeWell germanium detectors, any signal of >0.1 Bq/kg will be detected from 1 g of material.