US firm Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc reports that its Thermo Scientific Viewpoint Enterprise radiation detection system, inaugurated at the 2007 Labour Party Annual Conference, is available for wider security markets. That’s including first responder, nuclear power, industrial and medical facility protection.
The 2007 Labour conference was in Bournemouth, attended by more than 12,000 delegates, media and exhibitors. Responsible for the meeting’s overall security, Dorset Police chose the Thermo Scientific radiation monitoring system to manage and monitor potential radiation threats during the conference.
The largest security operation ever staged by the Dorset Police, involving more than 400 police officers, the event required a flexible but dependable system that would provide precise radiological detection in real time at various sites throughout the venue and surrounding areas. Equally important was that every sensor and detector be connected into a central information hub where the radiation warnings could be immediately assessed and located. With the capability to tie together all of the remote sensors via a robust, open and scalable IT architecture, the product acted as the command and control focal point for centrally processing and analysing instrument and detector information.
The product has four components: the ViewPoint appliance with the ViewPoint data engine pre-installed; user workstations or viewing ‘clients’ that the system will be deployed upon; instrument (input) device plug-ins; and client plug-ins. For the event, the data engine received information from the system inputs, a set of detection appliances installed at strategic locations at the site, and routed the input to the command center, which employed multiple workstation PCs for display, job coverage or database logging walk-through portals.
The detection appliances were also used to equip a Thermo Scientific survey vehicle for a remote vehicle search site (RVSS) to screen vehicles entering the conference’s confines and to provide wide area radiological background trending. The survey vehicle, outfitted with gamma and neutron probes, an ADR air concentrator detector, a GID spectroscopy personal radiation detector (SPRD) and a RadEye PRD, also drove predetermined routes twice a day monitoring radiation levels and comparing them with previous background radiation surveys.
A centralised communication network allowed the real time transmission of data, recorded by the Thermo Scientific detection appliances, to be sent to Dorset Police’s Winfrith headquarters and to the Thermo Scientific RVSS via the ViewPoint system. The system, operated with Windows NT/2000/XP, not only produced real time dose readings but also GPS data that enabled police officers and Thermo Fisher Scientific personnel to specify the location of a radiological event.
During the conference, a Thermo Scientific TPM 903B transportable portable monitor was also used to ensure that nobody carrying potentially threatening radioactive materials would enter the conference site. The makers add that all of the detectors at the event featured the inherent capability to distinguish between naturally occurring radiation and radioactivity that is artificial and could pose a serious threat.
"The ViewPoint system was easy to use and provided a high degree of confidence," said Supt Charlie Eggar, Dorset Police. "The Thermo Fisher Scientific team fitted in very well with the CBRN operation and had the expertise to keep the systems working reliably. They also had the reachback capability to assist with the speedy identification of any alarm activations. This was demonstrated when alarms were set off by low level sources used in press cameras that caused an alarm to activate when a large number of cameras were grouped together." For more information about the Thermo Scientific ViewPoint system:
