Abstract
The operation of reloading the irradiators is considered among the tasks requiring high radiation protection monitoring, to protect the intervening manipulators, the public and the environment. Morocco is among the countries that have a cobalt irradiator, installed at the National Institute of Agricultural Research (NIAR) of Tangier, to carry out research in the field of agronomy. In the beginning, the irradiator used low doses of activity for the study of products only, for treatment of high doses. The NIAR carried out a reload to increase the activity. To perform this, a temporary pool was installed inside the irradiation room to handle the sources safely. A radiation protection study is necessary to ensure the safe operation. This operation requires a height level of exposure. To ovoid the exposer risk, it is proposed to use the Monte Carlo method thanks to its reliability in the dosimetric calculation. This article presents a radiation protection study of the Moroccan irradiator reloading operation using the GEANT4 Monte-Carlo Simulation Code.
Highlights
National Institute of Agricultural Research (NIAR) of Tangier has a panoramic cobalt-60 irradiator to carry out research in the fields of food conservation, protection and improvement of plants by induction of mutations
The irradiator contains 2 radioactive sources of sufficient activity only for the study of products which require low doses, but to carry out the treatments which require height doses, it takes a lot of irradiation time to reach the desired dose, and that will influence the quality of the products
The reloading operation was carried out in a water pool temporarily installed in the irradiation cell, which will allow the transfer of the source pencils from the supplier’s transport container to the SV68 irradiator container at the NIAR site
Summary
The irradiator contains 2 radioactive sources of sufficient activity only for the study of products which require low doses, but to carry out the treatments which require height doses, it takes a lot of irradiation time to reach the desired dose, and that will influence the quality of the products. To solve this problem, the NIAR decided to reloading the irradiator by adding 6 other sources to reach an activity of 60000Ci on the day of reloading.
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