Identification of the need for unmanned radiation monitoring facilities in the radiation monitoring of research reactors in Indonesia

Abstract

The facility’s licensee conducts environmental radiation monitoring in nuclear facilities to monitor radiation exposure in the facility’s vicinity. This activity is carried out also to monitor radiation release as a result of nuclear reactor operation. Aside from that, monitoring also works as a device to monitor radioactive release in a nuclear emergency. Therefore, the radiation monitoring system is crucial in nuclear utilization facilities to determine the number of radiation exposure to the surrounding environment. However, the existing stationary monitoring system has a risk of being unable to work if the system is down in case of natural disaster occurs. One way to mitigate this risk is to deploy an unmanned radiation monitoring system to monitor radiation exposure without putting personnel at risk. To define a suitable unmanned radiation monitoring system, identification of facilities and infrastructure required to design an unmanned radiation monitoring system for a research reactor in Indonesia is carried out. Facilities and infrastructure needed for unmanned radiation monitoring systems are unmanned aerial vehicles, radiation detector, control and communication module, navigation system, and software for the control system. These required facilities and infrastructure are then specified to determine the necessary specification for monitoring research reactor in Indonesia. The facilities’ required specifications are unmanned aerial vehicles with rotary-wing type, CdZnTe Detector, and GPS/GLONASS based navigation system. For infrastructure specification, control and communication module and software for the control system is not specified in how the system could meet the expected required performance rather than in detail. However, the system must provide and process measurement data in real-time to be presented in a radiation heatmap. Keywords: Identification, Radiation Monitoring, Unmanned