The Structural Experience gained and Lessons learned during the construction of the National Nuclear Forensics Laboratory at NECSA, in South Africa.

The construction of a nuclear forensics laboratory has been a process that required careful consideration for various aspects that may affect the future operational standard of the laboratory. Such aspects had to be brainstormed and strategically considered for making a decision on the structural design of the laboratory and were pro-actively included from the conceptual design phase of the entire construction process. This was done with a view of addressing some possible laboratory system’s deficiencies and factors that may adversely affect the laboratory’s future operational mode, proper performance and ultimately the credibility of the analytical results that would be obtained from the same laboratory. The NECSA-US’LLNL/LANL collaboration on nuclear forensics played a very critical scientific and technical role in providing some viable solutions in bringing some of these aspects into practical consideration from an early stage of the process during the construction of South Africa’s Nuclear Forensics Laboratory at NECSA. Such aspects to be discussed in this paper include clean laboratory principles in the context of radiological laboratory approaches vs chemistry laboratory approaches in view of ventilation systems configuration, temperature variations, instrumentation arrangements and set-up patterns, material routing within the laboratory structure and some others. In addition to the structural experience and lessons learned during the construction of this laboratory, this paper will eventually provide full details on the construction progress and operational status of the laboratory.