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) ====================================================================== February-March 1993 Vol. #2, #2 ====================================================================== 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 Trinoskey, LLNL Directors (3 Year): Carter Ficklen, CEBAF Jerry Miller, LANL FROM THE EDITOR'S TERMINAL (Bob May ) ====================================================================== Due to serious scheduling problems on my part, I've had to combine issues of two newsletters. Consequently, this is the February-March issue of the IARP E-Mail News Letter. Thanks to each of you who contributed in a timely fashion to the February request for information only to have it published in a bimonthly issue. With hopes that the following issues will be on schedule... read on! >From the President ====================================================================== Presidential Pot-Pourri January and February have seen continuing activity by your Committee on behalf of the members of the Section. o Membership Drive: IRPA Members and last year's Associate Members. I have personally contacted everyone that I know of who wished to join the Section as an IRPA (but not HPS) member, and all our "Associate" members listed in Harry Howe's Directory. Details of how to join and application forms were sent out. In addition Bob May contacted the Newsletter E-mail list giving this information. Welcome to all our new members who responded! o Scientific Session of the Accelerator Section in Atlanta. As you read in the January issue of the Newsletter, Geoff Stapleton met with the HPS Program Committee Chairman in Couer d'Alene to discuss this session. The Program Committee has passed on to us about 24 abstracts that requested the Accelerator Session. This is a tremendous achievement! The Board of the HPS is encouraging greater participation in poster sessions and we are working with them on this by ensuring that the poster session will be integrated with the oral papers and be in every way as important. Geoff has some innovative ideas for the Session. Following the huge success of Ralph Nelson's invited paper in Columbus, Geoff is aiming to have another distinguished keynote speaker to open the Session. We have proposed to the Program Committee that there is a sufficient number of abstracts to warrant an entire day to be devoted to accelerators and their radiation problems and would plan to hold the Section General Meeting and following Board Meeting in the mid-day break between Noon and 2 PM. A Poster Session will be introduced by a distinguished rapporteur and "sandwiched" between the verbal presentations to encourage optimum participation. o International Standard ISO/DIS 10647 - "Procedure for Calibrating and Determining the Response of Neutron Measuring Devices Used for Radiation Protection". You may have seen this draft that is finding its way around the "comments circuit". Nancy Johnson of the Secretariat has sent it out as has deVaughn Nelson of the DOE Office of Energy Research. There are at least two sections (#5, #10) which are of interest to accelerator people. The scope of the Standard has no upper-energy limit but the document appears to discuss only low-energy accelerators. As with so many other situations your Section has "our man" in a position of influence. Joe McDonald is a US expert on the Working Group preparing the Standard - I'm sure he would carefully consider any written comments you might send him. DeVaughn is also eager to hear from the DOE family. PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ THIS DRAFT AND COMMENT. YOU HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO INFLUENCE EVENTS. [ Editors Note: As a service to members, all of the Accelerator Section members on the IARPENL mailing list will receive an E-Mail copy of the proposed standard within about one week of the of the publication of this newsletter. ] o IRPA 9: VIENNA 1996 - Your section has two members on the IRPA-9 Programme Committee (Profs. Kazuaki Katoh and K. Kase). We are working with them to organize an Accelerator Session (seminar?) in Vienna. Preliminary discussions in Montreal established that, in principle, this was acceptable to IRPA but, of course needed detailed discussion. Following a suggestion from Nisy Ipe, I have written to Kazuaki and Ken asking that they consider letting Prof. Paretzke, Chairman IRPA 9 Programme Committee, know of the wishes of the Section in this regard. I am optimistic that they will give us enthusiastic support. Dr. Manfred Hoefert of CERN has very kindly offered to help at the appropriate time in the detailed planning for such a session in Vienna if we obtain approval to go ahead. o Anonymous Donor. I should like to acknowledge the generosity of the donor who gave $200 to the Section but remains anonymous. Thank you very much! o Accelerator RP History Wade Patterson, Chair of our ad hoc History Committee is working extremely hard in organizing the preparation of a history of radiological protection at accelerators. He has been able to persuade(cajole, wheedle, bully, browbeat, whatever!) an extremely eminent list of authors to give us both a professional and personal history. The emphasis will be on personal memories and the personalities who shaped accelerator health physics in the laboratories of the 1950's and beyond. Wade's aim is to produce the final draft by early 1994. Already a professional publisher has expressed interest! Anyone who has an interesting tale or anecdote that they wish to share should contact Wade. Ralph. H. Thomas, President NEWS FROM IARPENL CORRESPONDENTS ====================================================================== News from CEBAF Bob May () ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Update on CEBAF Linac Cryomodules Over half of CEBAF's 40 linac cryomodules (4 superconducting accelerating cavity pairs per module) are now installed -- 16 in the north linac, 5 in the south. The north linac modules are fully checked out; the pre-operational testing reported on earlier is continuing there, while south linac installation proceeds. Siemens has now supplied 358 of the 360 cavities ordered; in vertical tests, mean usable gradient for all cavities has risen to 10 MV/m, double the specification, at a mean Q of 5.6 X 10E9. (The Q spec is 2.4 X 10E9.) During February, a workshop was held at CEBAF on an important aspect of cavity technology, microwave-absorbing materials. The Microwave- Absorbing Materials for Accelerators (MAMAs) Workshop was sponsored jointly with NASA Langley Research Center, the National Institute of Ceramics Engineers, and the Department of Defense Ceramics Information Analysis Center. Some 140 scientists and engineers from 6 countries heard papers on topics that included MAMAs in accelerators and microwave power tubes, manufacturing methods and material properties characterization, and absorber design. News from CERN (Manfred Hoefert ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The first months of the year are as usual busy with the annual shutdown of the CERN accelerators and the writing of the annual report of the group. This report is an obligation to the authorities of our host States, France and Switzerland and comprises five sections presenting the results of enviromental radiation monitoring, informing about the radiation control on the sites of the Organization, describing the radiation protection activities around the CERN accelerators, reporting on personnel dosimetry, calibration and instrumentation and briefly commenting the non-routine activities of the Radiation Protection Group. The radiological impact report for the LHC that had been written last year was in principle approved by the CERN committee, dealing with the relations to our host States, but will be shelved at least until May when vital decisions on the number of experiments and the operation of LEP after the LHC should be taken by the Scientific Policy Committee. In addition machine parameters keep changing where hopefully the "old" radiological figures can still be used and scaled with new beam energies and intensities. In the meantime the group got a modest sum from the European Community to support the programme on the intercomparison of active and passive dosimeters in radiation stray fields produced under defined conditions at CERN. Beam monitoring and Bonner spheres are actually set up and will serve later in the year to provide important information to all the expected participants from outside CERN. These measurements will be compared with results from MC-calculations on the field composition. News from ESRF (E. Braeuer ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Question from the ESRF There will be an experiment at the ESRF called GRAAL, where a laser beam will "shoot" directly into the 6 GeV electron beam of our storage ring and a high energy gamma beam of 1.5 GeV will be tangentially extracted with an opening angle to the laser beam of about 500 microradian. Beam intensity goes up to 10 E7 gammas per second. This gamma beam is well collimated and hits, or better, traveses a liquid hydrogen target, which is housed in a steel tank. Afterwards the beam is dumped in a big concrete enclosure. By far the most important targets for the gamma beam are the 0.5 mm thick steel and 7 mm thick beryllium windows and the 10 thick liquid hydrogen target. (A total of about 2.4 g/cm2). I would appreciate very much any help to estimate the dose values at various locations, like 2m from the 'scattering source' for the 90 degree direction and 6 m distance for about a 10 degree direction. Please contact me as soon as possible. Fax.: 33 76 88 24 18; Tel.: 33 76 88 21 15 or by bitnet: BRAEUER@FRILL51. I thank you for your collaboration. Elke Braeuer News from KEK (Hideo Hirayama ). News from LAMPF (Sarah Hoover ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Current best estimates of LAMPF operations for 1993 are still being developed. In June, machine studies will be conducted on the linac to study its possible use as a source of protons for an up- graded accelerator based neutron spallation source for neutron scattering (LANSCE II). At present, it is anticipated that the production tune-up will occur in July with production running from August through December. After this run cycle, future LAMPF operations are uncertain due to budgetary constraints. Updates will be provided as more information becomes available. News from SLAC (Vashek Vylet ) (Mike Grissom ) 2. NLCTA (Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator) The construction of the accelerator enclosure started last month. The end wall of End Station B was partially dismantled and large shielding blocks are being moved into position. The enclosure should be finished in its 'raw' state in June, with parts of the roof being still open to allow access for equipment and utilities. The rest of the year will be spent on installing utilities, drilling roof blocks for waveguide penetrations, sealing and painting. Radiation Physics is contemplating a possibility to create a crude 'irradiation facility' by leaving a gap between the shielding blocks of the dump, in the forward direction. Any comments, suggestions or past experience with similar setups would be welcome. (Vashek Vylet ) 3. LCLS (Linear Coherent Light Source) Following the recommendations resulting from an internal technical review held at SLAC last November, the LCLS collaboration is studying possibilities of a small scale experiment that would demonstrate the feasibility and pave the way for a full scale LCLS facility. One option being considered is to use the 'Paladin' wiggler from LLNL in sector 1 of SLAC's linac. Although this option remains uncertain, ideas about adding focusing to Paladin might be finally used in the full scale project. The use of strips of permanent magnets (PM) as edge-field quadrupoles seems a viable alternative to conventional quads. These strips would be located inside the wiggler, between and in period with the PM dipoles, achieving flux densities of ~100 T/m. Another interesting idea (although less likely to be adopted) is to use multiple wigglers instead of a single one. In this setup, subsequent wigglers are tuned to increasingly higher order harmonics. Four modules of a total length of 19m could replace the 60m single wiggler. The advantage of this option is a more coherent light and short wavelengths achievable with lower electron energies. However, the power output would be about two orders of magnitude lower. A preliminary cost estimate for the whole project is $30M. Vashek Vylet, SLAC News from Trieste (A. Rindi ) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A question from A. Rindi to Health Physicists at Synchrotron Radiation Facilities: Do you control any beamline where the SR beam crosses a path in air without containment? What are the safety conditions you enforce in such lines? Please, address answers to Answers may also be published in the Newsletter Best wishes A. Rindi EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES ====================================================================== Health Physics positions open at SLAC. Radiation Surveys and Operations Group Leader Duties: Develop programs and write procedures for the control of exposure to ionizing radiation and the control of radioactive materials: A) Radioactive materials and waste--material surveys, material storage, inventory, procedure development, liaison with waste vendor, material characterization, sealed source program, radioactive material shipping and receiving; B) Nuclear materials representative-- maintains inventory, produces appropriate transaction decay and material balance reports. Make and interpret radiation measurements. Includes the operation and cal- ibration of multichannel analyzers, GM and ionization chambers, ultra high purity germanium detectors. OHP representative to SSRL: Health Physics service to SSRL, procedure development to ensure SSRL consistency with SLAC Radiation Safety Program. Assemble and test equipment for planned measurements and experiments. Supervise and conduct health physics operational surveys of accelerator areas, components, laboratories and radioactive sources/use areas: A) Technician Level Services--accelerator surveys, instrument calibration, procedure development, radiation physics support, non-ionizing radiation surveys; B) Environmental Monitoring--environmental TLD, water analysis and other media as necessary. Plan/coordinate entries into radiation areas with emphasis on ALARA principles in conjunction with an understanding of the physical processes producing the radiation field and the effects of existing shielding. Also manage the Irradiation Service: Coordinate Radiological Calibration Facility (RCF) use activities for experimenters as well as routine instrumentation calibrations. Supervise the activities of the Radioactive Materials Manager and the Radiation Surveys Manager and their technical staffs. Skills/Experience: The applicant must understand the use of equipment for radiation monitoring such as electrometers, proportional counters, scintillation counters and ionization chambers. Must have a M.S. level education in Health Physics or greater and several years of experience in a comprehensive radiation safety program. Must be able to work independently with little or no direct supervision from the OHP head. Must be able to set work priorities to mutually benefit management, workers and other SLAC departments. Must work well in interdisciplinary mode in the ES&H division. Must be able to interface with professionals in all parts of SLAC and SSRL. Must be able to converse, report to, and work with regulatory agencies on the Federal, State, and local level. Must deal with peers at other DOE facilities as well as a variety of commercial vendors. Must be able to plan, schedule, and assign work for other professional level employees as well as technicians. Supervision is a key element of performing the group's mission. Must be willing to perform labor-type duties. Must have no permanent handicaps that would preclude one from doing surveys or any type of field work. Applicant must be willing to learn to use the SLAC computer system. Applicant must have good communication skills, both written and oral. This position is classified as a Health Physicist III, with a starting monthly pay range of $3,830 to $6,631. Refer to Job #16059. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Health Physics Training Manager Duties: Responsible as the Manager for Health Physics Training in the Operational Health Physics (OHP) Department. The work includes providing most of SLAC's radiation protection training to include general employee, radiation worker 1, radiation worker 2, radiological controls technician, and professional health physics refresher courses. Plans, prepares, and conducts training in radiation protection for laboratory and contractor employees. Provides assistance to the training coordinator in the scheduling and control of radiation protection training programs for all of the worker populations. Maintains knowledge of training requirements listed in DOE Orders and other mandatory compliance documents, e.g., the DOE Radiological Control Manual, and informs both support and programmatic managers of training requirements. Creates or helps develop and maintain computerized training record data bases for training conducted in the radiation protection field. Audits training programs conducted by other laboratory organizations to ensure regulatory compliance, e.g., Radiological Work Permit radiation protection job specific training. Participates in initial and refresher training to maintain currency in subjects to be taught. Periodically assists in OHP activities to maintain currency in radiation protection practices and policies. Participates in DOE Training Resources and Data Exchange (TRADE) activities. Skills/Experience: Training at the M.S. level or higher in Health Physics or a related Engineering or Physical Science program with some coursework in Health Physics with at least 3 years of operational health physics experience in dosimetry systems or at the B.S. level in the above disciplines and with 5 years of operational health physics experience. Must be able to supervise technical radiation protection staff. Must have sufficient understanding of the underlying principles of health physics, radiation protection theory and practice and the measurement and analysis of ionizing radiation and radioactivity. Should be computer literate (IBM PC systems preferred) and must be willing to learn the SLAC mainframe computer system (VM). Must have good communication skills, written and oral. Extensive experience in presentation of courses of instruction, public information responsibilities or tutoring required. This position is classified as a Health Physicist II, with a starting monthly pay range of $3,283 to $5,481. Refer to Job #16056. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ SLAC offers excellent benefits including generous vacation and tuition grants for children. For immediate consideration, send your resume, indicating appropriate Job Number, to SLAC; P.O. Box 4349, M/S 11, Stanford, CA 94309, Attn: Larry Peckler. Equal opportunity employer through affirmative action. Mike Grissom, SLAC FROM THE MEMBERSHIP ====================================================================== Regarding the informal physics education our (young) children receive on Saturday mornings... observations have led to the conclusion that certain unique laws are acting on cartoon bodies. This information, in part, has been submitted to the editor of this distinguished publication by Suzie Thomas and will be included (from time to time) for your critical review: Cartoon Law 1: Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. e.g. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar of 32 feet per second per second takes over. Stay tuned to the IARPENL for further information. CLOSING THOUGHTS ====================================================================== Opening quote from "Radiation Hormesis" by T.D. Luckey... "We have met radiation and radiation is us"! Pogo paraphrased