Radiation Monitoring System Research Articles

Development of an omnidirectional Compton camera using CaF[formula omitted](Eu) scintillators to visualize gamma rays with energy below 250 keV for radioactive environmental monitoring in nuclear medicine facilities

We developed an omnidirectional Compton camera for radioactive environmental monitoring which can visualize gamma rays with energy below 250 keV emitted from various radiopharmaceuticals used in nuclear medicine facilities to prevent occupational radiation exposure. An omnidirectional Compton camera based on high light yield scintillators CsI(Tl) or NaI(Tl) developed in our previous studies is a promising system for environmental radiation monitoring because it has a wide field of view and high sensitivity for sub-MeV gamma rays. However, its sensitivity rapidly decreases below 250 keV because photoelectric effect becomes more dominant than the Compton scattering process due to their large effective atomic numbers (approximately 50). Thus, CaF2(Eu) was adopted, which has both low effective atomic number (approximately 15) and high light yield. Four CaF2(Eu) crystals were arranged symmetrically to achieve a relatively uniform acceptance in all directions. Similarly, the detector rotation technique was adopted to suppress artificial patterns in a reconstructed gamma-ray image because of the small number of crystals. Through experiments in a laboratory and at a nuclear medicine facility, the capability of the camera to visualize gamma rays in energies from 250 keV to 60 keV with reasonable observation time for practical clinical use was confirmed.

Overall design of radiation monitoring system formaritime nuclear facilities

The Radiation Monitoring System (RMS) is designed to check continuously the reactor at the operating set points, it assures that no individual and persons receive an unnecessary or hazardous exposure to radiation. According to the process and operation characteristics of Small Modular Reactor (SMR), these radiation monitoring channels can be grouped into the process radiation monitoring subsystem, the effluent radiation monitoring subsystem, the area radiation monitoring subsystem and the Post Accident Monitoring Subsystem (PAMS). Based on the architecture design of RMS, the demand of signal interface and power interface is analysed. Through introducing the marine environment, the problems of anti-shock, vibration, inclination and swing of loads are put forward.

Development of a desktop radiation monitoring system

This article presents the design and development of a digital desktop gamma radiation monitoring system using Geiger–Muller tube detector and microcontroller. The radiation detector, battery, signal processing circuits, and the microcontroller board are housed inside a tabletop wooden model with an analog watch and a digital display of radiation dose rate. The alarm level has been set at 1 μSv/h and indicated through buzzer and LED. The system has been calibrated using 137Cs standard source and has a sensitivity of 0.7364 cps/μSv/h. This model can be displayed on any table/desk or kept near a doorway to continuously monitor background radiation level, without drawing public attention, to detect any movement or presence of radiation source.

Development elements of the information and measurement systems of mobile environmental monitoring

The article presents a proposal to improve the system of radioactive monitoring in the territory of St. Petersburg using an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a radiation detector. This radiation remote sensing device is essential to ensure environmental safety. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with sensors will make it possible to effectively obtain data on the radioactive contamination of the earth's surface and airspace. An un-manned aerial vehicle with a radiation sensor will allow you to receive data in real time. In the event of a potentially hazardous situation, this device will measure fluctuations in the dose rate distribution on the ground and can be used for radiation monitoring. For this purpose, an improved mobile radiation monitoring system has been created. The system consists of models whose functionality allows you to measure dose rates and create radiation pollution maps without the need for human personnel to be present at the measurement site. The convenience of the radiation monitoring system is the rapid deployment of unmanned monitoring devices to reduce the radiation burden on the population. The system can be used in any place where a source of ionizing radiation may be present. Before this system can be used in real-world conditions, its components are calibrated based on certified measuring equipment and state-of-the-art modelling tools.

UAV prototype for localization and identification of radioactive contamination and emitters

The Dragon (Drone for RAdiation detection of Gammas and Neutrons) prototype aims at designing and developing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a detection system able to identify radioactive materials, spread over an area or located in a specific position. The system is focused on the localization of the unknown emitter and its subsequently identification. The proposed prototype is made up of two easily interchangeable detection systems, one will be used as a counter while the second will be aimed to perform goodresolution gamma spectroscopy. Both solutions have neutron gamma discrimination capability in order to be suitable for special nuclear materials (SNM) detection in gamma contamination background. The data acquisition module is made up of a compact digitizer board (RedPitaya, sampling rate of 125 MHz and 14 bits of resolution.), a mini computer (Raspberry, for example). This combination allows to install an embedded operating system (e.g. Linux) that can run the necessary software for the Data Acquisition (DAQ), like the ABCD distributed DAQ. Our contribution will be aimed to show a comprehensive characterization of the two detection systems, a medium size CLLB scintillation detector, and a large plastic scintillator, EJ-276, in order to assess their potential use in a UAV-based radiation monitoring system.

Особенности радиационного фона различных районов Санкт-Петербурга

Radiation safety takes an essential part in the megalopolises' ecological system. Nowadays the influence of radiation factor on the biosphere is considered one of the determining factors and it causes the necessity to monitor the environmental and radiation safety of the population. The aim of the study is a comparative assessment of the ambient equivalent dose rate (ADER) of gamma radiation according to automated radiation monitoring system (АSКRО) data and its own measurements in the South-Western district of St. Petersburg. The article presents an analysis of the radiation background of St. Petersburg over the past five years based on the data of the АSКRО, as well as the results of own measurements of the ADER in the South-Western district of St. Petersburg using the dosimeter-radiometer "Ecologist profi". When analyzing the radiation levels of various districts of St. Petersburg, it was found that the regions with a relatively higher level of ADER included the Central and South-Western regions. The results of our own meas-urements are comparable with the data from АSКRО; there are no significant differences be-tween the data samples. The results of the study show that the АSКRО data can be used for a general description of the radiation situation in certain areas of St. Petersburg, but they can not serve as a substitute for operational radiation control (monitoring). It is necessary to constantly control and monitor the radiation situation in the region in order to obtain information for timely detection of changes in the radiation situation and to prevent possible negative consequences of radiation exposure for the population and the natural environment.

Summary of Application of Vehicle Radiation Environmental Monitoring System

The vehicle-borne radiation environmental monitoring system is not restricted by time, location and weather, and in the event of a sudden nuclear accident, it can quickly enter the accident site and monitor the ambient reflectivity level and absorbed air dose rate at the first time. At the same time, the vehicle-borne data communication and processing system is used to transmit the real-time data to the platform of emergency monitoring and dispatching, which provides powerful technical support for accurate radioactive evaluation and emergency decision-making. At present, domestic and foreign research on vehicle-borne environmental radiation monitoring system is more extensive, but there are fewer summary articles. In this paper, the application and development direction of the vehicle-borne radiation environmental monitoring system are briefly described, and some suggestions are proposed for establishing of corresponding dose correction methods and technical regulations according to the problems faced by the existing technology.

Comparative analysis of the assessment of material costs on an ARMS system and the elimination of the consequences of a radiation accident at an atomic energy facility

The work provides a comparative analysis of the material and financial costs for the development and operation of an Automated Radiation Monitoring System (ARMS) for monitoring of the environmental radiation situation and the damage associated with the elimination of the consequences of a radiation accident at an Atomic Energy Facility. Furthermore, we consider a brief scenario of the sequence of operations of the ARMS system related to the assessment of radioactive pollution of the environment, in the framework of a hypothetical accident of level 7, on the INES scale, and that of the Atomic Energy Facility. The work presents the main methods and means of the ARMS system. The system helps to carry out modern methods of assessing dose loads on the personnel and the population of the region exposed to a radioactive release torch. It also helps in the elimination of the effects of radioactive pollution of the environment and its damage to the population, agricultural land, parks and reserves. The maintenance work and the evacuation of the population from the contaminated area is considered. It shows that the material and financial costs of nuclear power plant equipment, which allows for radiation monitoring, maintenance, as well as work-related to prognostic assessments of radioactive pollution of the environment, are much less than the costs of eliminating the consequences of severe radiation accidents at nuclear power plants.

Development of Microcontroller-Based System for Background Radiation Monitoring.

An appearance of radiometers and dosimeters on free sale made it possible to provide better radiation safety for citizens. The effects of radiation may not appear all at once. They can manifest themselves in decades to come in future generations, in the form of cancer, genetic mutations, etc. For this reason, we have developed in this paper a microcontroller-based radiation monitoring system. The system determines an accumulated radiation dose for a certain period, as well as gives alarm signals when the rate of the equivalent dose exceeds. The high reliability of this system is ensured by a rapid response to emergency situations: excess of the allowable power of the equivalent radiation dose and the accumulator charge control. Further, we have composed a microcontroller electronic circuit for the monitoring radiation system. Additionally, an operation algorithm, as well as software for the ATmega328P microcontroller of the Arduino Uno board, have been developed.

Fault Tolerant Radiation Monitoring System Using Wireless Sensor and Actor Network in a Nuclear Facility

Fault Tolerant Radiation Monitoring System Using Wireless Sensor and Actor Network in a Nuclear Facility

Automated system for operational chemical and radiation monitoring of water areas of the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation with flooded underwater potentially dangerous objects

Long-term operational control systems for pollution of the aquatic environment near potentially dangerous underwater objects in ice conditions in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation are described. The systems are based on the use of bottom stations that measure the levels of radiation and chemical pollution of the aquatic environment and transmit monitoring information via satellite and (or) sonar communication channels. The information transmitting via the satellite communication channel is carried out by the direct ascent of the station itself, and in the case of ice cover, the transmission of information is carried out using a pop-up antenna unit capable of drilling ice. Transmission via the sonar communication channel is carried out between the stations and the receiving unit.

Caracterización de materiales para el diseño y desarrollo de colectores y receptores de radiación solar térmica de concentración

El trabajo que se presenta muestra el estudio de diferentes materiales a utilizar en el diseño de colectores y receptores para usar en la construcción de prototipos innovadores que usen tecnología basada en el empleo de la Energía Solar Térmica de Concentración (ESTC), para la generación de calor y electricidad.Se estudiaron las propiedades ópticas de los diferentes materiales propuestos, así como su estabilidad térmica y durabilidad ya que con ellos se construirán, específicamente, los componentes de la tecnología de sistema de Colector cilíndrico Parabólico (CCP). Con el propósito de alcanzar mayor eficiencia en el proceso de transformación de energía, se optimizaron, a través del diseño y la simulación, diversas geometrías del dispositivo, que se articularán a los sistemas de seguimiento de la radiación solar en la unidad CCP prototipo, tomando en consideración las regiones geográficas de aplicación.

Ionizing radiation monitoring requirements at the Divertor Tokamak Test facility

Abstarct The Divertor Tokamak Test facility (DTT) will operate with d -D plasmas producing pulses lasting about 60 s and producing a neutron yield up to 1.5 × 1017 n/s. Due to the high neutron yield, a significant activation of the structures and residual radioactivity after shut-down will be present. Consequently, DTT will need a robust radiation protection system to prevent undue worker and population exposure. The objectives of this system must be met during normal operation, maintenance, decommissioning and in emergency situations, thus several safety features must be routinely guarantee, among which the radiation monitoring system is probably the most crucial. This paper presents the general requirements of this monitoring system, giving some details about the preferred characteristics for the involved devices and monitors. The monitoring system shall be composed by portable instruments, passive ambient dosimeters and a limited number of fixed active measuring stations, suitable to detect and record the appropriate dosimetric quantities both for neutrons and photons. The active measuring stations and the passive dosimeters will constitute two monitoring networks designed in such a way to cover the area of interest to radiological survey around DTT.

A Confident Configuration for an Environmental Radiation Monitoring System

This work presents a high-resolution, high-confidence, and high-temperature-stabilization prototype environmental radiation monitoring system (ERMS) with integrated digital filter, peak-finding algorithms, and real-time analyses. Through measuring <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">137</sup> Cs and <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">60</sup> Co radiation sources with the same NaI(Tl) detector, the features of the digital multichannel analyzer (DMCA) in our system, including throughput, energy resolution, and peak shape, were compared with those of a commercial instrument, namely the DSPEC jr 2.0 from ORTEC, USA. The results indicate that the full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) and peak heights obtained with our DMCA are better than those obtained with the DSPEC jr 2.0 up to 12%. The ERMS also integrates a solar power supply, multimodal data transmission, and a weather channel, thus facilitating its deployment in boundary areas or far islands for monitoring and forecasting radioactive propagation. Therefore, the proposed configuration system is highly promising in terms of performance and low cost of maintenance.

Development of information collection scheme in internet of things environment for intelligent radiation monitoring systems

The new revolution in computing and wireless communications technologies led to Internet of Things (IoT). Information collection scheme performs an important role for energy efficient utilization and latency awareness in IoT environments. The enhancement of an effectual information collection scheme is crucial to improve the overall performance of the internet of things applications. In this paper, the proposed information collection scheme aimed to enhance the confidence regarding any captured measurements under IoT environment. The scheme can verify the selection of optimal information collection routes through using the Dijkstra algorithm. It depends on selecting the preferable IoT devices (collectors) with optimal paths in efficient energy utilization. The IoT devices (sources) have to elect whichever a preferable collector can deliver the captured information with an endeavour to sense the latest contextual information. They elect the optimal collectors through implicit and explicit solutions. Also, it considers different failure conditions to specify the optimal collection time for furtherance scalability of IoT environment. The simulation results show the ability of our scheme to improve the performance in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, and reliability.

Results of Separation of the Galactic Cosmic Rays and Earth’s Inner Radiation Belt Contributions to the Daily Dose Obtained by DB-8 Dosimeters of the Radiation Monitoring System Onboard the International Space Station in 2001–2014

The DB-8 dosimeters of the standard radiation monitoring system (RMS) were in operation almost continuously from August 2001 to December 2014 in the Service module of the ISS. The data obtained with its help were used for daily operational assessment of the radiation situation on board the station. In this work we analyze the results of separation of the contribution to the daily dose of galactic cosmic rays and from the Earth’s inner radiation belt using dosimetric data obtained as a result of the station’s passage in areas of the highest geomagnetic latitudes. The article presents the results of analysis of dosimetric data using this method for the period 2001–2014, as well as a comparison with similar results obtained by the authors earlier using the technique based on an analysis of dosimetric data obtained during station passages in the area of the South Atlantic Anomaly. This article extends the results of our previous works to the entire time range of functioning of DB-8 dosimeters as a part of the RMS of the ISS.

In-situ remotely controllable ocean radiation monitoring system

Prompt in-situ monitoring of sea radiation contamination is crucial to prevent the sea from spreading radioactive materials to other parts of the world and the hazard of internal exposures in marine life and the human through food chain. In this paper, we evaluated the performance of a new ocean radiation monitoring robotic boat prototype system. The system featured real-time and on-site gamma spectroscopy with a portable detector of a CsI(Tl) crystal and a PIN diode carried by an unmanned surface vehicle. The system performed good energy linearity and energy resolution (21% at 662 keV). The efficiency and the minimum detectable activity (24 h acquisition) for underwater 137Cs detection were 1.334 × 10−5 and 2.5 Bq/kg, respectively. We conducted a Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the detection performance with uniform and point source distributions. In the water tank experiments, we measured the count rates with differing depths of a 137Cs point source. The maximum detectable distance was 50 cm according to both experiment and simulation results. Additionally, on-site experiment was conducted to test the operability of the system in a real sea. The overall study showed the feasibility of the system for in-situ ocean radiation monitoring.

Unmanned Radiation-Monitoring System

The absence of online radiation-monitoring systems (RMSs) has been observed in the case of the Fukushima nuclear accident. As the tsunami destroyed 23 of the 24 status-monitoring points, almost no relevant radiation dose measurement data were available. Rapid deployment of a mobile radiological unit that can quickly determine the activity and direction of the radioactive cloud spread on the ground or in the air can prevent unnecessary deaths and related financial losses. Although the design of the current generation of nuclear power plants (NPPs) incorporates features that minimize the risk of large radioactive releases outside the reactor, it is still important to focus on the development of systems that can mitigate the consequences of such events. In situations when the level of radiation does not permit the personnel to perform the required measurements, online unmanned RMSs may come into play. For such a purpose, the RMS-00x RMS could be used, which is a modular system covering the functionality of dose rate measurement, air sampling, and radiation map creation without requiring human personnel to be present at the measurement site. The main purpose of the RMS-00x RMS is the rapid deployment of unmanned monitoring devices to reduce the radiation burden on workers and on public. The system can be applied in the vicinity of an NPP or at any location, where the source of ionizing radiation could be present. Before this system is used in real conditions, its components must be thoroughly calibrated, based on certified measurement equipment and the state-of-art simulation tools. This article deals with the description of the RMS-00x sensor modules and demonstrates their functionality in combination with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In addition, the use of the developed technology was demonstrated as part of the regular emergency planning and preparedness exercise of Jaslovkse Bohunice NPP (EBO NPP) on October 26, 2017.

Fiber-read radiation monitoring system using an optical fiber and red-emitting scintillator for ultra-high-dose conditions

We have developed a remote scintillation detector using a CCD spectrometer and a red-emitting scintillator coupled with a 20 m optical fiber for ultra-high-dose conditions. Gamma rays were detected with a conventional deep-red-emitting ruby scintillator and Cs2HfI6, which is a novel material with 700 nm red emission and a high light output. The scintillators were irradiated with gamma rays from a 60Co source under an effective dose rate from ∼0.002 to ∼1 kSv h−1. The integrated area of the Cs2HfI6 emission spectra was larger than that of the ruby, and good linearity of the Cs2HfI6 signal as a function of dose rate was confirmed.

LEVELS OF EXPOSURE TO IONIZING RADIATION AMONG THE PERSONNEL ENGAGED IN CYCLOTRON OPERATION AND THE PERSONNEL ENGAGED IN THE PRODUCTION OF RADIOPHARMACEUTICALS, BASED ON RADIATION MONITORING SYSTEM.

This paper aims to determine the levels of exposure to neutron and photon radiation among the personnel engaged in cyclotron operation and the personnel engaged in the production of radiopharmaceuticals, with the use of the environmental radiation monitoring system (RMS) installed in the positron emission tomography laboratory. The annual exposures of employees operating the cyclotron measured with the use of the RMS system are: 1.39 ± 0.16 mSv in case of photon radiation and 2.61 ± 0.14 mSv in case of neutron radiation. In the case of employees in the radiopharmaceuticals’ production zone, the annual exposures measured by means of the RMS system are 0.15 ± 0.03 mSv in case of photon radiation and 0.11 ± 0.01 mSv in case of neutron radiation. The exposure levels among the personnel engaged in cyclotron operation and the personnel engaged in the production of radiopharmaceuticals are below the permissible radiation dose limits.