THE REFERENCE WEBSITE for ENVIRONMENTAL RADIOACTIVITY MEASUREMENTS in FRANCE

The national network for environmental radioactivity measurements centralizes all the monitoring data on environmental radioactivity in France and ensures their quality and harmonization through an approval procedure.

One of its strengths lies in manifold information sources: measurements come from the governmental services and its public establishments, from operators of nuclear installations or from other public, private or associative actors.

Since 2010, the website www.mesure-radioactivite.fr has made accessible to all, with transparency, the 300 000 measurements carried out annually in France (for a total near 2 million data in 2016) in the various compartments (air, water, soil, fauna and flora) and in foodstuff.

The website www.mesure-radioactivite.fr is a unique initiative in Europe which helps everyone obtain a clear grasp of the radioactivity monitoring carried out around his place of life.

CENTRALIZATION

There is today a rich and various environmental monitoring in the French nuclear landscape, carried out by a multitude of actors. The environmental radioactivity data, which are fed to the RNM, include the results of the measurements carried out by :

• the operators of the nuclear facilities who, in accordance with the regulatory requirements, ensure the control of the environmental radiological status around their installation;
• the local authorities, the governmental services and its public bodies in charge of the sanitary control of water and food;
• any public, private or associative body which thus participates in the radiological monitoring of French territory.

The national measurement network RNM collects and centralizes these data from various sources in a single database.

HARMONIZATION

The website www.mesure-radioactivite.fr allows to follow the evolution in time of the radiological status of a given environmental compartment and to compare measurements made by different actors. Comparison is made possible by the application of rigorous and homogeneous measurement methods and criteria for data harmonization such as units of measurement.

Pour être To be fed into the base of the RNM, the measurements must be carried out by laboratories approved by the Nuclear Safety Authority. This approval is issued on the advice of a multiparty approval committee.

RELIABILITY

Laboratories must satisfy two cumulative conditions to ensure the measurements reliability:

• International Standard ISO / IEC 17025 which sets up the general requirements for competence to perform tests and / or calibrations, including sampling ;
• the interlaboratory comparison tests organized by the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety (IRSN). These proficiency tests consist in comparing the results obtained by the laboratories on identical samples to a reference value.

RELEASE of MEASUREMENT RESULTS

The website www.mesure-radioactivite.fr/en#/ allows everyone to have a grasp of the radioactivity monitoring carried out around his place of life.

Entirely redesigned in 2016, the website tries to better meet visitors’ expectations, either aimed at the general public, by offering a "guided" mode of consultation, or an "advanced" mode for a more informed public. For more details, see « How to use the site ».