SAFETY IMPROVEMENT OF THE RADIOACTIVE WASTE STORAGE FACILITY IN ALBANIA

The Albanian National Radioactive Waste Storage Facility (NRWSF) constructed in 1999 consists of an interim waste storage facility for very low level waste, low level waste, intermediate level waste and disused sealed radioactive sources (DSRS) coming from research institutions, agriculture and industrial activities and from applications in nuclear medicine in Albania. The safety assessment of this facility is performed considering its impact to workers, public and environment. In 2018, Albania started a new National project Alb 9010 titled 'Upgrading the Radioactive Waste Storage Building According to International Standards'. The two fundamental objectives are to ensure the protection of the public, workers and the environment and to ensure retrievability of waste packages for final disposal. The project focuses on ensuring the safety of the treatment, conditioning and storage of radioactive waste and DSRS. Under this project has been done the improvement of the safety of the RWSF and upgrading of the existing building infrastructure. In the end of the project the objective is to improve the safety of the personnel in the RWSF, protection of public and environment, Upgrade the Equipment's used in the RW Management Activities, Upgrade the existing Infrastructure of the RWSF Building and also ensure retrievability of waste packages for final disposal.

FIRST STEP TOWARDS THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF INDOOR RADON IN DWELLINGS IN ALBANIA

The realisation of the geographical distribution of the indoor radon concentrations in dwellings represents a valuable tool necessary for assessing the public exposure. In this work are reported the results of the indoor radon obtained in the first stage of the survey involving 247 measurements. From the preliminary information on ∼10 % of the territory, covering the biggest cities in Albania results on indoor radon concentrations ranging from 14 to 1238 Bq m^-3 with an arithmetic mean of 120±67 Bq m^-3 The population-weighted average indoor radon concentration was calculated to be 101 Bq m^-3 The adopted survey strategy highlighted the necessity for the future stages to spread the measurements in order to cover the entire territory of Albania, instead of remaining focused only on the demographic criteria.