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===== Typical instruments that the CNSC laboratory calibrates under the scope of accreditation =====
===== Typical instruments that the CNSC laboratory calibrates under the scope of accreditation =====
Adapting all in-house MS Excel spreadsheets, writing procedures and work instructions to comply with all the ISO/IEC 17025:2005 standard requirements was certainly a big challenge. There are a lot of documents!
Another significant challenge was to find proficiency testing (PT) providers with appropriate measurement capabilities to meet ISO compliance requirements. The capabilities of the few established and reputable PT providers, such as the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), are limited to their well-characterized artefacts consisting of working measurement instruments for air kerma measurements. Their PT capabilities do not extend to field instruments such as personal dosimeters and gamma survey equipment.
It is important to note that the accreditation task presented to the Standards Council of Canada (SCC) and NRC CLAS, with the measurement scope that the CNSC laboratory sought, was the first of its kind for all three of these primary project stakeholders, and a first for Canada. The unique scope of accreditation turned out to be a challenge for the SCC and the NRC Calibration Laboratory Assessment Service (NRC CLAS), as the requirements for the analysis of measurement uncertainties and model equations, in addition to data analysis of the measurements and interpretation of the comparison of results from PT exercises are different from other physical and electrical metrological calibrations.
==== What’s next? ====
==== What’s next? ====