Abstract
The necessity to monitor international commercial transportation for illicit nuclear materials resulted in the installation of many nuclear radiation detection systems in Portal Monitors. To overcome the difficulty of innocent alarms due to a large content of natural radioactivity or medical nuclides, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) supported the writing of the ANSI N42.38 standard (Performance Criteria for Spectroscopy-Based Portal Monitors used for Homeland Security) to define the performance of a portal monitor with nuclide identification capabilities, called a Spectroscopy Portal Monitor. To accomplish the necessary performance, several different HPGe detector configurations were modeled using MCNP for the horizontal field of view (FOV) and vertical linearity of response over the detection zone of 5 meters by 4.5 meters for 661 keV as representative of the expected nuclides of interest. The configuration with the best result was built and tested. The results for the FOV as a function of energy and the linearity show good agreement with the model and performance exceeding the requirements of N42.38.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
