AERB Nuclear Medicine Facility Guidelines

The point AERB makes itself, that owners routinely miss

AERB states it plainly in its own guidance: it approves layout plans from the radiation safety standpoint only. Every other statutory permission has to be obtained separately from the municipal and government agencies concerned.

So an AERB-approved layout is not a buildable design. It is a shielding and access-control clearance. It confirms that walls, occupancies and controlled routes satisfy radiation safety — and it says nothing about whether your scanner fits through the corridor, whether the slab carries it, or whether power and cooling reach it.

What the typical layout does not account for

Every item below sits outside AERB's remit, and any one of them can invalidate a layout that has already been approved:

• The OEM's actual room requirement. Minimum dimensions, service clearances and access space are model specific and often exceed the template figure
• Equipment ingress. Nothing in the layout process checks whether the gantry can reach the room — corridor widths, lift capacity, turning radii and door openings fall outside AERB's scope entirely. See difficult site access.
• Structural capacity. AERB specifies wall and slab construction for shielding, not for load. A slab can shield adequately and still not carry the gantry. See structural certification.
• Floor levelness to the tolerance the gantry depends on. See floor levelness.
• Power, UPS and DG sized against real peak demand, and where the DG room actually sits. See power backup.
• Dedicated earthing to the manufacturer's stated tolerance. See earthing and grounding.
• HVAC, chiller siting and plant access — the chiller platform has to be structurally designed and left serviceable
• Cable trenches and false flooring, which have to be planned before the floor closes
• Fire egress and municipal norms, which AERB explicitly leaves to you and which regularly conflict with a shielded wall. See site layout approval.

A layout drawn only to satisfy AERB tends to get approved and then redrawn once the equipment supplier's requirements arrive. Drawing it once, against both, is considerably cheaper.

The sequence AERB sets out

The order matters, because two steps are gates rather than milestones. No construction may begin before AERB approves the specific layout, and any later deviation from the approved plan has to go back to AERB. Broadly the path runs:

• Register the institute in eLORA
• Prepare site plan, floor layout and cross-sectional drawings, with input from the RSO, architect and equipment supplier
• Submit for Site and Layout Approval, and wait for it before building
• Appoint registered Radiation Professionals and nominate an RSO
• Procure TLD badges from the AERB-accredited laboratory for your region
• Obtain procurement permission for the equipment and sources
• Intimate equipment receipt through eLORA within 15 days
• Complete QA tests and the radiological survey, and submit the reports
• Pre-commissioning inspection, then apply for the Licence for Operation
• Thereafter: annual safety status report by 31 January each year, and periodic QA at renewal

AERB notes that a Site and Layout application is liable for rejection where plans are not in the proper format, carry insufficient information, or are unsuitable on radiation safety grounds. In practice the second is the common one — drawings that omit occupancy labels, material densities or cross-sections.

The documents

Published by the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, Government of India, for the eLORA system. Mirrored here for convenience.

How we use them on a project

We prepare the site plan, floor layout and cross-sectional drawings in the format AERB requires, and we prepare them against the equipment supplier's pre-installation requirements at the same time — so one set of drawings satisfies both the regulator and the machine. Shielding is calculated for the actual workload and occupancy rather than taken from the template. See our AERB consultation page, or PET-CT department design for the hot lab, uptake room and patient flow side of it.