A portable swipe monitor for alpha contamination

Author

Whitley, C.R. ; Bounds, J.A. ; Steadman, P.A.

Author_Institution

Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NM, USA

fYear

1997

fDate

9-15 Nov 1997

Firstpage

68

Abstract

A portable swipe monitor has been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for the state of New Mexico. The monitor is intended for use at New Mexico ports of entry to detect removable alpha contamination on shipments bound for the proposed Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). This detector uses Long-Range Alpha Detection (LRAD) technology, which monitors ionization created by alpha interactions with ambient air, and includes built-in background subtraction of external radiation fields and radon. Its sensitivity to alpha contamination is on the order of a few tens of dpm, and it has excellent linearity throughout its entire range of over 200,000 counts per minute of alpha activity. Designed to be used primarily in the field, the monitor is battery-powered and can operate continuously for up to five hours

Keywords

air pollution; air pollution measurement; alpha-particle detection; ionisation chambers; nuclear materials transportation; portable instruments; radiation monitoring; radiation protection; radioactive pollution; radioactive waste; LANL; LRAD; Los Alamos National Laboratory; WIPP shipments; Waste Isolation Pilot Plant; alpha contamination; background subtraction; ionization chamber; portable swipe monitor; Bioinformatics; Contamination; Genomics; Ionization; Isolation technology; Laboratories; Linearity; Monitoring; Pollution measurement; Radiation detectors;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Nuclear Science Symposium, 1997. IEEE

Conference_Location

Albuquerque, NM

ISSN

1082-3654

Print_ISBN

0-7803-4258-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/NSSMIC.1997.672510

Filename

672510