Monitoring airborne alpha-emitter contamination

Author

Kerr, P.L. ; Koster, J.E. ; Conaway, J.G. ; Bounds, J.A. ; Steadman, P.A. ; Whitley, C.W.

Author_Institution

Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NM, USA

fYear

1997

fDate

9-15 Nov 1997

Firstpage

62

Abstract

Facilities that may produce airborne alpha-emitter contamination require a continuous air monitoring (CAM) system. However, these traditional CAMs have difficulty in environments with large quantities of non-radioactive particulates such as dust and salt. Los Alamos has developed an airborne-plutonium sensor (APS) for the REBOUND experiment at the Nevada Test Site which detects alpha contamination directly in the air, and so is less vulnerable to the problems associated with counting activity on a filter. In addition, radon compensation is built into the detector by the use of two measurement chambers

Keywords

air pollution; air pollution measurement; alpha-particle detection; nuclear explosions; plutonium; radiation monitoring; radioactive pollution; Nevada Test Site; Pu; Pu sensor; REBOUND experiment; airborne alpha-emitter contamination monitoring; continuous air monitoring; nuclear explosions; Alpha particles; CADCAM; Computer aided manufacturing; Contamination; Detectors; Filters; Monitoring; Pollution measurement; Radioactive materials; Testing;

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.1997.672508

Filename

672508