Environment

One of the Institut Laue-Langevin's principal priorities is to fully control its impact on the environment. It pays great attention to continually improving its management procedures for waste and the releases produced by its high-flux research reactor, thus ensuring total compliance with French regulations. To control its environmental impact, it continuously monitors releases from the site and also operates an environmental radiation monitoring programme over a distance of 10 kilometres around the site.

The ILL's environmental monitoring facilities include:
-    Four environmental monitoring stations located outside its site responsible for taking air samples and continuously measuring radiation levels in the atmosphere
-    An accredited laboratory responsible for monitoring levels of radioactivity in the environment. The ILL measures the radioactivity of samples taken from all environmental

media (air, soil, surface and groundwater, run-off water, aquatic and land plants, agricultural produce, and bioindicators).

The measurement results are published on the website of the RNM (the French national network for environmental radioactivity measurements), which is managed by the ASNR. ILL is a member of the RNM network and therefore plays a part in monitoring radiation levels at national level. It is the only such agency in the Grenoble area.

ILL takes redundant measurements for monitoring releases from the reactor. As for its environmental monitoring, this is a continuous activity, involving sample-taking and laboratory analyses. ILL also has a laboratory separate from the environmental monitoring laboratory, responsible specifically for measuring the radioactivity of its liquid and gaseous releases.

The French authorities themselves cross-check all these analyses to validate the results we submit.