Mangalore University sets up India's first dedicated iodine aerosol research facility for nuclear safety

Key facts

• Mangalore University has established India's first dedicated experimental facility for iodine aerosol generation and characterisation at its Centre for Advanced Research in Environmental Radioactivity (CARER), Mangalagangotri campus, announced on October 16, 2026.
• The facility was developed with financial support from the Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences (BRNS), Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), and technical collaboration from the Radiological Physics and Advisory Division (RP&AD), Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai.
• It is the first such dedicated facility in India outside a DAE institution, reducing dependence on foreign experimental data for reactor safety research.
• The facility, an upgraded walk-in environmental chamber, enables precise control of temperature, relative humidity, ozone concentration and background aerosol levels to study iodine behaviour under severe reactor accident conditions.
• Experimental data from the facility will help validate and improve computational models used in reactor safety analysis, source-term estimation and accident consequence assessment.
• The first phase of the collaborative experimental programme with BARC scientists began on October 7, 2026 and runs until October 22, with the second phase planned for November 2026 and the third for January 2027.