Dose Assessment for Some Industrial Gamma Sources with an Application to a Radiation Accident

Abstract

Accidents involving industrial radiography are the most frequent cause of severe or fatal overexposure to workers and the public. On May 5, 2000, a radiation accident happened at a construction site in a gamma radiography practice at the village of Meet Halfa-Egypt. The accident was a severe overdose of non-radiation workers due to external exposure of Ir-192. This paper provides a methodology for calculating doses and dose rates from the most commonly used industrial γ-sources: 192Ir, 60Co, 134Cs, 137Cs and 131I. For this purpose, MCNP computer code based on Monte Carlo technique is used. The applied method helps firstly in studying and analyzing the doses from the above mentioned sources. Secondly, it provides a lead container design in a trial to reduce the dose rate within the permissible. Computer models were used to simulate the 192Ir Meet Halfa accident. To verify these models, the calculated doses were compared with a well-known empirical formula to convert source activity into dose rate and then the models were applied at different distances to analyze the factors that affect the deposited dose in the human body to find out the dose received by the victims.

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Massoud, E. (2014) Dose Assessment for Some Industrial Gamma Sources with an Application to a Radiation Accident. Open Journal of Modelling and Simulation, 2, 4-11. doi: 10.4236/ojmsi.2014.21003.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

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