Abstract
Radiological characterization of components in accelerator environments is often required to ensure adequate radiation protection during maintenance, transport and handling as well as for the selection of the proper disposal pathway. The relevant quantities are typical the weighted sums of specific activities with radionuclide-specific weighting coefficients. Traditional methods based on Monte Carlo simulations are radionuclide creation-event based or the particle fluences in the regions of interest are scored and then off-line weighted with radionuclide production cross sections. The presented method bases the radiological characterization on a set of fluence conversion coefficients. For a given irradiation profile and cool-down time, radionuclide production cross-sections, material composition and radionuclide-specific weighting coefficients, a set of particle type and energy dependent fluence conversion coefficients is computed. These fluence conversion coefficients can then be used in a Monte Carlo transport code to perform on-line weighting to directly obtain the desired radiological characterization, either by using built-in multiplier features such as in the PHITS code or by writing a dedicated user routine such as for the FLUKA code. The presented method has been validated against the standard event-based methods directly available in Monte Carlo transport codes.
Highlights
The radiological characterization of components after their use in an accelerator facility is an important task for operational radiation protection, due to the need to define adequate radiation protection measures during maintenance, transport or handling of a component or due to the need to select a proper disposal pathway.The relevant radiological hazard factor for radiological characterization can often be written as a weighted sum, with radionuclide specific weighting coefficients, of specific activities.The commonly used methods for obtaining the required specific activities are briefly presented and analyzed
Summary The fluence conversion coefficients method for radiological characterization has been presented based on the analysis of the capabilities of the standard methods for radiological characterization
It is based on the reformulation of the often required weighted sum, with radionuclide specific weighting coefficients, of specific activities, denoted as radiological hazard factor, as summation of the particle type dependent and energy dependent fluences with a set of fluence conversion coefficients
Summary
The radiological characterization of components after their use in an accelerator facility is an important task for operational radiation protection, due to the need to define adequate radiation protection measures during maintenance, transport or handling of a component or due to the need to select a proper disposal pathway.The relevant radiological hazard factor for radiological characterization can often be written as a weighted sum, with radionuclide specific weighting coefficients, of specific activities.The commonly used methods for obtaining the required specific activities are briefly presented and analyzed. The radiological characterization of components after their use in an accelerator facility is an important task for operational radiation protection, due to the need to define adequate radiation protection measures during maintenance, transport or handling of a component or due to the need to select a proper disposal pathway. The relevant radiological hazard factor for radiological characterization can often be written as a weighted sum, with radionuclide specific weighting coefficients, of specific activities. The commonly used methods for obtaining the required specific activities are briefly presented and analyzed. This analysis highlights the need of an alternative method providing fast convergence, automatic normalization and good visualization capabilities. A new method based on fluence conversion coefficients is developed that satisfies these requirements. The formulation of the method and its implementation is presented and its capabilities are demonstrated on selected examples
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