Using RFID To Track Hazardous Materials

Published: April 15, 2014

The U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory and Savannah River National Laboratory have developed several active RFID technologies for nuclear applications by government and civilian industries. ARG-US is licensed for commercial production, and has been deployed at several DOE sites. The software manages dataflow among tags, readers, secured databases and Web servers for nuclear material containers during transportation and storage, including offsite source recovery for global threat reduction. The system is improving safety, security, accountability, worker and public health, and environmental protection during storage, transportation and disposal. Learn about an additional RFID system being developed into a wireless sensor network (WSN) platform for monitoring critical facilities, such as civilian nuclear power plants and spent nuclear fuel storage sites. The Rapid Deployable Global Sensing Hazard Alert System (SAV-EM), developed at Savannah River National Laboratory, uses Iridium satellite communications for tracking, and is credit-card-sized. Find out how SAV-EM can provide worldwide geo-location without GPS, but has a dual GPS-Iridium receiver that automatically switches to GPS when signal strength is sufficient. In addition, an ultra-high-secure 802.11/WiFi connection is used for high-speed short-range link, and can be employed by the oil and gas industry, as well as various federal government organizations.

Speakers: Dr. James M. Shuler, Manager, Packaging Certification Program (PCP), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE); Brion J. Burghard, Senior Research Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory