About China Institute for Radiation Protection

China Institute for Radiation Protection

The China Institute for Radiation Protection (CIRP) is China's specialist national institute for radiation protection, based in Taiyuan, Shanxi, within the China National Nuclear Corporation system. CIRP describes itself as the only comprehensive scientific research institution solely dedicated to the research and application of radiation protection in China. Established in 1962, it has served for six decades as the country's leading fundamental and forward-looking research base in the field — the institution that works out how workers, patients, the public and the environment are to be protected from ionising radiation while China's nuclear industry operates and grows. Its address, P.O. Box 120, Taiyuan 030006, appears on decades of Chinese radiation protection literature, and its official website is cirp.org.cn.

Established in 1962

CIRP was established in 1962 with the approval of Nie Rongzhen, Vice Premier of the State Council — a founding detail the institute records prominently, reflecting both the seniority of its authorisation and the era of its birth, when China's nuclear programme was a matter of direct concern to the state's top leadership. Former Vice Premier Zhang Aiping later inscribed a calligraphic tribute for the institute's thirtieth anniversary, describing it as a pioneer of radiation safety and protection technology and a safeguard of nuclear energy development, phrases CIRP still uses in presenting its identity.

Over the past six decades, in the institute's own account, it has served as a leading, fundamental and forward-looking scientific research base of radiation protection in China, as well as a technical reserve and talent training base in the field, and has made critical contributions to the development of the nuclear industry in China. That combination — research base, technical reserve and training base — defines its position: CIRP does not operate reactors or treat patients, but the nuclear industry's ability to do those things safely depends on the protection science, measurement methods and trained people the institute supplies.

Fields of work

CIRP has been engaged in several major fields, which its English-language presentation lists as radiation protection and radiological medicine, nuclear emergency and safety, nuclear environmental science, nuclear decommissioning and radioactive waste management. Each field corresponds to a stage of the nuclear fuel cycle and facility life: protecting people during normal operations and in medicine, preparing for and responding to emergencies, understanding how radioactivity behaves in the environment, and finally decommissioning facilities and managing the wastes that remain.

The institute presents its future direction in terms of focusing on nuclear power and the nuclear fuel cycle, taking its radiation protection technologies developed over sixty years and an optimised integration of its structure as its platform, and providing nuclear safety and radiation protection related products, services and support. Its stated goal is to build itself into a world-class research institute. Its chairman of the board, named in its English brochure, is Liu Qun.

Nuclear emergency and safety: a national support centre

In nuclear emergency work, CIRP holds formal national roles. It is the National Nuclear Emergency Radiation Protection Technical Support Center and provides the National Technical Support Team for Radiation Protection, and it hosts the International Atomic Energy Agency's Capability Building Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response. In practical terms, the institute states that it can provide intelligent robots and special vehicles required for emergency response, customising radiation survey capability for accident conditions, can provide sanitary access management for nuclear facilities, supplies and services the iodine adsorbers of ventilation systems at all nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities in China, and can develop emergency radiation protection programmes for operators.

The IAEA connection runs through training as well as response. CIRP delivers IAEA-listed training in radiological emergency preparedness and response, radiological safety and protection, assessment, decontamination and dosimetry, for professionals from competent authorities, research institutes and technical support organisations. An institute that trains other countries' specialists, under the IAEA's listing, occupies a recognised place in the international radiation protection system rather than serving only its domestic industry.

Nuclear environmental science

CIRP's environmental work has the longest published record of any of its fields. A forty-year review of nuclear environmental science in China, published from the institute, highlighted the joint efforts of CIRP and the China Institute of Atomic Energy in site characterisation, pollutant monitoring around nuclear sites, ecological transfer parameters, field experiments and environmental impact assessment of air, surface water and groundwater. Over the period from 1964 to 2001 covered by the review, the two institutes' researchers completed 82 large projects, including 24 non-nuclear-related ones, and 329 environmental impact assessment study projects, including 218 non-nuclear-related ones — figures showing that the institute's environmental methods came to be applied well beyond the nuclear industry itself.

The same review describes the specialised facilities CIRP built for this work: a Low Background Environmental Radioactivity Laboratory, a Nuclear Industry Environmental Radiation Simulation Laboratory consisting of a wind tunnel and air boundary layer experimental setup, a Polluted Surface Water Migration Laboratory, an Aerated Zone Pollutant Migration Laboratory, a Field Test Site for Nuclide Migration Study, and an Underground Research Facility for Aquifer Nuclide Movement Test. Facilities of this kind — wind tunnels for atmospheric dispersion, field sites and underground laboratories for the movement of radionuclides through soil and groundwater — are the physical basis on which environmental safety cases for nuclear facilities are argued.

Learning from radiological accidents

A distinctive strand of CIRP's published work is the systematic study of what has gone wrong. Its experts produced, for the International Atomic Energy Agency, an analysis of the lessons from radiation accidents in China over forty years, covering the period from 1954 to 1994. Based on statistical data from the competent authority, the paper introduced and analysed the radiological accidents and events of those decades and drew lessons in areas including the control of radiation sources, the training of radiation workers and the improvement of the national radiation safety infrastructure, noting that revised basic safety standards referring to the IAEA's International Basic Safety Standards were then being drafted.

The institute's monitoring capability was demonstrated publicly after the Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan in March 2011. A CIRP paper in its own Radiation Protection Bulletin described how the institute quickly started an emergency monitoring programme of environmental radiation in Shanxi, measuring gamma dose rate, aerosol, airborne radioiodine, radioactive fallout, precipitation, surface water, organisms and soil. The results showed no obvious change in gamma dose rate and iodine-131 in soil below the detection limit, while detecting iodine-131 in aerosol, air radioiodine, fallout, precipitation, surface water and organisms — a measured, published account of a transboundary event recorded from hundreds of kilometres away.

Radiation protection research and the professional community

CIRP publishes the journal Radiation Protection from Taiyuan, long a principal Chinese-language record of the discipline — its articles appear in the IAEA's International Nuclear Information System across decades, on subjects from the radiological environmental impact of China's nuclear industry to surveys of radioactive material transport in China, which recorded some 100,000 transport packages a year with a total activity of about 1.8 petabecquerels and noted that accidents with serious radiation hazard had never occurred in that transport system. CIRP staff likewise present China's radiation protection research at congresses of the International Radiation Protection Association.

The institute's place in the wider system is also visible in the work of its senior scientists. Pan Ziqiang, of the Ministry of Nuclear Industry's safety system and CIRP's field, co-authored the thirty-year assessment of radiological environmental impact in China's nuclear industry, which reported that radiation doses to the critical group around nuclear facilities were less than 5 millisieverts a year, with 77.1 per cent of unit-years below 0.25 millisieverts a year. Assessments of this kind — institute-measured, published and internationally archived — are how the safety performance of an entire industry is evidenced.

Products, services and industrialisation

CIRP is not a purely academic institute. It states that, taking the CIRP Technology Co., Ltd. as its platform, it is capable of providing nuclear safety and radiation protection related products, services and engineering support to the nuclear power industry and other nuclear facilities. Its service list drawn from its own materials includes ventilation-system iodine adsorber supply and servicing across China's nuclear fleet, emergency equipment including intelligent robots and special vehicles, sanitary access management systems, and the technical services of its national emergency support roles. This industrial arm turns the institute's research — on adsorption, dosimetry, decontamination and monitoring — into equipment and contracts in operating plants.

Why CIRP matters

The China Institute for Radiation Protection matters because every other part of China's nuclear enterprise presupposes its subject. Reactors, fuel plants, hospitals and decommissioning projects can only operate within a system of protection standards, measurement methods, environmental evidence and emergency capability — and in China that system has a single dedicated comprehensive institute at its centre. Founded in 1962 with a Vice Premier's approval, host to the national emergency radiation protection support centre and an IAEA capability building centre, publisher of the discipline's record and measurer of everything from wind-tunnel dispersion to Fukushima fallout in Shanxi soil, CIRP is the institution where Chinese radiation protection, as a science and as a practice, principally lives.