INTERNATIONAL ACCELERATOR RADIOLOGICAL PROTECTION E-MAIL (IARPE) NEWSLETTER "The Official Publication of the Accelerator Section of the Health Physics Society" (with Contributions from International Correspondents) ====================================================================== January 1993 Vol.2 #1 ====================================================================== OFFICERS ====================================================================== President: Ralph Thomas, LLNL Past President: Wade Patterson, LLNL President-Elect: Geoff Stapleton, SSCL Secretary/Treasurer:Nisy Ipe, SLAC Directors (1 Year): Frank Masse', MIT BATES Paul Neeson, D.O.E. Directors (2 Year): Gerald Fallon, MIT BATES Paula Trinowski Directors (3 Year): Carter Ficklen, CEBAF Jerry Miller, LANL FROM THE EDITOR'S TERMINAL (Bob May ) ====================================================================== Welcome to the first issue of the newsletter for 1993. This newsletter provides you with important information regarding the Accelerator Section activities at Coeur d'Alene. As always, we rely on you for the content of the newsletter. Let us know what is important to you. NEWS FROM OUR CORRESPONDENTS ====================================================================== A Question from Trieste (A. Rindi ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "...a question to all the health physicists working at electron facilities. Do you know of any place in the world where one uses in routine electron accelerators for producing positron emitters for PET diagnostics? If you have any information, please, call me." News from SSCL (Geoff Stapleton ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The SSCL is looking for a head of operational health physics. This is a position carrying considerable responsibility for the early design and implementation of equipment and procedures for a laboratory that will probably become the worlds largest hadron physics facility. The qualifications expected will be commensurate with such an important job. Call Geoff Stapleton if you are interested. News from DESY (Herbert Dinter From May to November 1992 the e/p-storage ring HERA ran very successfully. 10 bunches of circulating electrons at 26 GeV collided with 10 bunches of protons at 820 GeV. Typical lifetimes were 3 to 4 hours for electrons and 24 hours for protons. During these months the detectors ZEUS and H1 had good opportunity to take a lot of data. There is a scheduled shut down period up to end of February 1993 for all DESY accelerators. After restart in March it is intended to increase further the intensity of the colliding HERA beams and to reach the design values. At the end of December 1992 Domink Dworak, a guest physicist working with the radiation protection group returned to his home institute, the Institute of Nuclear Physics at Krakow, Poland. During a fruitful period of 2 years he studied the production and transportation of photons produced by neutrons in bulk shielding matter (report Nuclear Instruments and Methods A321 (1992) 589) as well as the transportation of neutrons (originating from interaction of high energy protons with target material) in different kinds of labyrinths (report being in preparation). ACCELERATOR SECTION NEWS ====================================================================== Proposed Minutes of Combined Executive Board and Section Meeting of the HPS Accelerator Section held January 26, 1993 at Coeur d'Alene, Idaho Executive Board members present: Frank Masse, Jerry Miller, Geoff Stapleton, Ralph Thomas, and Paula Trinowsky. In addition 10 section members also attended. Apologies of absence were received from: Gerry Falton, Carter Ficklen, Nisy Ipe, Paul Neeson and Wade Patterson. Geoff Stapleton agreed to act for the Secretary at the meeting. 1. The agenda for the meeting was presented and approved. The agenda is attached to the minutes. 2. The minutes of the previous meeting of the Executive Board and Section held at Columbus, Ohio, June 22, 1992 were approved with one correction. Frank Masse to be listed as present for the meeting. Motion to adopt corrected minutes proposed by Roger Kloepping and seconded by Jerry Miller and carried without dissent. 3. Presidents Report: During the past six months the following actions had been taken on behalf of the membership. . Members of IRPA affiliated organizations who were not HPS members could now become members of the Section upon payment of $6 dues. . Harry Howe had produced and distributed the first draft of the members directory. Members were asked to ensure their entries were correct. . Bob May had been appointed as Newsletter Editor, taking over from Nisy Ipe. . Initiated negotiations for a "special" meeting of the Section at San Francisco at the 1994 HPS Conference. . President-elect nominated to organize the Atlanta scientific/technical meeting. . History Committee set up under Wade Patterson. . The President recommended that the Secretary/Treasurers job should be split between two persons. . Appointed the Newsletter Editor to be a member of the Executive Board ex officio. . Recommended the appointment of a Parliamentarian to handle the rules and by-laws and any changes to the charter which might be required by the members. . Approved the formation of a Publications Committee and a History Committee. While no vote was taken at the meeting all the President's recommendations received general support from those present. 4. Vote of thanks to Nisy Ipe Nisy Ipe was accorded a vote of thanks for her pioneering efforts in setting up the Section Newsletter. The motion was proposed by Frank Masse, seconded by Roger Kloepping and passed unanimously. 5. Atlanta Meeting The President elect informed the meeting that he has estimated that approximately 20 papers would be offered for Atlanta and that he awaited receiving the abstracts from the HPS Conference Committee. The provisional program would have a distinguished invited speaker with overseas contributors making oral presentations with the US contributors providing a combination of oral and breakout presentations. It was expected that we would be in a position to make firm proposals to the HPS Organizing Committee by February 25. 6. NRRPT Paula Trinowsky informed the meeting that she had great concerns with the training requirements set out in DOE's Radiation Control Manual. The NRRPT were setting up task forces to attempt to repair some of the damage caused by the manual. She also requested contribution of articles on accelerator health physics for the NRRPT News. 7. Other Business Health Physics Journal Editor in Chief: The President informed the meeting about the forth coming retirement of the editor in chief of the HPS Journal and said that any suggestion for his successor should be forwarded to him. After discussion the President was requested to forward Ken Kase's name as a possible candidate. The President informed the meeting about the proposal for revising NBS43.4 and stated the need for volunteers to be considered for membership of the committee charged with revising the document. Paula Trinowsky volunteered her name. The President also called for any nominations for the Burton Moyer award. There being no other business, the meeting was adjourned. A WELL DESERVED LETTER OF THANKS ====================================================================== Dr. E. Ipe C/O Advanced Photon Source/XFD/362 Argonne National Laboratory Argonne, Illinois 60439-481 Dear Elizabeth, A Resolution Thanking Nisy Ipe. At the recent meeting of our Accelerator Section in Coeur d'Alene a motion was unanimously passed thanking Elizabeth (Nisy) Ipe for her pioneering efforts in establishing the Newsletter that has attained an international readership. The motion was proposed by Frank Masse and seconded by Roger Kloepping. Everyone attending was extremely enthusiastic in support. The President was instructed to write informing Dr. Ipe of this vote of thanks. To this resolution may I add my personal thanks? I admire the innovation that created the Newsletter, the enthusiasm with which you performed the multitude of tasks that nurtured it to its present stature and the energy that made it all possible. It is no mean feat to be able to encourage a group of accelerator health physicists to regularly provide copy and meet press dead-lines! Accompanying this letter of thanks and appreciation are our best wishes for professional success in your sabbatical at ANL. Kindest personal regards Sincerely, Ralph. H. Thomas President Accelerator Section Health Physics Society OTHER IMPORTANT INFORMATION ====================================================================== The following is a reprint for information purposes of a letter from Jack Rodgers, Chair, ANSI N43.4. AT&T Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Avenue P.O. Box 636 Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636 908-582-3000 January 18,1993 Re. ANSI N43.4 Accelerator Standard Writing Group Dear Colleague: The response to the announcement in the December HPS Newsletter of the revision of The American National Standard N43.l Radiological Safety in the Design and Operation of Particle Accelerators (copy enclosed) has been very encouraging and the number of responses confirms date need for a new standard. I have not been able to keep up with my end of year activities and personally call all of you. My apologies! With this letter, I want to acknowledge that I have received your messages and letters. To those of you receiving this letter, who have not yet volunteered for this writing group, this is a plea for you to consider becoming involved. Your names were submitted to me from a variety of sources. Your experience working with accelerators and developing guidelines has been noted Please use that experience to help write this new standard. The task at hand in forming the writing group is to obtain input from accelerator manufacturers, end users, and regulators. The majority of people who have contacted me have been end users, mostly Health Physicists. That stands to reason, since the announcement was in our Newsletter. The role of Health Physicist is not always as an end user and some of you may be in the position to represent manufacturers or regulators. To form a balanced committee, I'll need to know the viewpoint you can represent. I hope that manufacturers of accelerators and regulators find this an opportunity to participate in the standards writing process. Many of you have asked about the qualifications needed to serve. Willingness to contribute to the development of a standard that has utility to safety personnel representing end users, manufacturers and regulators is the only real qualification. By having a good cross section of views, we can put together a meaningful document. My first objective for the writing group is to define the scope of what the new standard should actually cover. Should we really try to have EVERY type, use, etc., covered by one standard? The scope of the old standard was limited to accelerators with energies less than 100 MeV. That doesn't help most dealing with the 100 MeV plus accelerators, but then there are many lower energy accelerators to be considered. In 1969 when N43.l was written, the electronics industry was just beginning to use accelerators for the doping and analysis of semiconductors. These accelerators, called ion implanters, had a very rapid growth right after N43.l was completed, so these accelerators now need to be considered. The ion implanters may well represent the largest number of accelerators in use today. It is important to note that not everyone using these accelerators, which typically operate in the 1O0-200 KeV range, is aware that the use of deuterium can produce neutrons inducing radioactivity. N43.l points out deuteron- initiated nuclear reactions at energies below 1 MeV but, since deuterium is not a standard dopant of semiconductors, neutron production has not been considered by most. Items like that should be more clearly spelled out in a new Standard. Then there are election microscopes. Certainly not the safety problem that high energy accelerators represent but regulators recognize them as accelerators, defining their use as for the production of radiation. New Jersey's accelerator regulations include them. Most scanning electron microscopes operate below 100 KeV, but transmission electron microscopes operate at energies of 200-400 KeV and some as high as 1 MeV. They all need to be given consideration, as would x-ray machines operating at comparable energies. So where do we go? That is input I need from all of you! From your prospective, what do you think the scope of N43.4 should be? Please send me an outline of what you feel this standard should or should not cover. Once we establish the scope, we can move on to formalizing the project with ANSI and set a target date for the public review of the new standard. If you have any questions, please contact me. Mail, phone and FAX information is listed in the HPS News Letter. Jack W. Rodgers Chairman, N43.4 Enc. N43.1 HPS Newsletter NJAC 7:28-20 CLOSING THOUGHTS ====================================================================== "We have an illiterate society in science in so many ways... I have to deal with a society that doesn't know what I'm talking about, so we can't communicate well in the labnguage of radioactivity." James Watkins, former United States Secretary of Energy, in a a valedictory interview with Judy Woodruff on the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour, January 14, 1993... just before leaving office.