INTERNATIONAL ACCELERATOR RADIOLOGICAL PROTECTION E-MAIL (IARPE) NEWSLETTER "The Official Publication of the Accelerator Section of the Health Physics Society" May/June 1999 Circulation: 247 Vol. 8, #3 OFFICERS President: Steve Musolino, BNL {musolino@bnl.gov } President-Elect: Joe McDonald, PNNL {jc_mcdonald@ccmail.pnl.gov} Past President: Vaclav Vylet {vylet001@mc.duke.edu} Secretary: Scott Schwahn, Jefferson Lab {schwahn@jlab.org} Treasurer: Gerry Fallon, MIT {fallon@bates.mit.edu} Newsletter Editor: Elaine Marshall, FNAL {emarshall@fnal.gov} Directors: Wes Dunn, International Isotopes (1999) {Wdunn@intiso.com} Henry Kahnhauser, BNL (1999) {kahnhaus@bnl.gov} Bob May, Jefferson Labs (2000) {may@jlab.org} Keith Welch, Jefferson Labs (2000) {welch@jlab.org} Mike Grissom, SLAC (2001) {mikeg@slac.stanford.edu} Marcia Torres, ANL-E (2001) {mtorres@anl.gov} FROM THE PRESIDENT For those of you planning on attending the HPS Annual Meeting, the Accelerator Section will meet on Tuesday, June 29, after the Accelerator session. I encourage all that are able to attend. These meetings offer Section members the opportunity to present their ideas and help direct Section activities. The preliminary agenda is below. - Election Results - Treasury Status - IARPE Newsletter - Section Support of the Moyer Award - Erice Meeting - Rejected Journal Article - Selection of nominee for IRPA Delegation - Bylaws Revision Steve FROM THE NEWSLETTER EDITOR For some time now, the IARPE Newsletter has been on the Web. One of the ideas that has been tossed around is to post the newsletter off of the Health Physics Society Web page. This has two advantages. The first is that the URL will not change with each newsletter editor. Secondly, the Newsletter would be available to a wider audience through the Society home page. Tracy Tipping pursued this with the Webmaster for HPS and found him to be very receptive to the idea. The next issue will contain more details. Elaine UPDATE ON ERICE More than two years ago Drs Alessandro Rindi and Ralph Thomas brought up the issue of reviving the "International School of Radiation Damage and Protection. Under the umbrella of this school, which is based at the Ettore Majorana Center for Scientific Culture in Erice, Sicily, a series of very successful and popular courses were conducted throughout the seventies. Ralph secured help of the Accelerator Section and with a promise of funding by the European Commission (EC), the outlook was very optimistic. However, it appeared difficult to establish communication with the Ettore Majorana Center. After unplanned delays, by the end of 1998 it become clear that funding from EC dried out and we had to start all over. Contrary to previous information, it was discovered that the School already had two directors in place: Drs Goebel and Schoenbacher from CERN. With their help, contacts with the E. M. Center were renewed and a new promise of funding by EC was secured. They suggested to appoint the two of us as co-directors, who will be in charge of preparing the program, making arrangements with the E. M. Center and drafting the proposal for funding to be submitted to the appropriate office at EC headquarters. Professor Zichichi, Director of the E. M. Center, approved the proposal for an "Accelerator Health Physics"course and nomination of the two co-directors. The funding by EC implies that the proposal must originate from a European institution, it will therefore be submitted from CERN. However, we count on a strong participation of HPS Accelerator Section members, both as students and faculty. Discussions about available dates and other details are under way, and we will report further news in future issues of IARPE. Graham Stevenson graham.stevenson@cern.ch Vashek Vylet vylet001@mc.duke.edu NEWS FROM JEFFERSON LAB Once again, Jefferson Lab's external dosimetry program has become DOELAP (Department of Energy Laboratory Accreditation Program) accredited. The high-energy neutron component in our dosimetry, a chemical etch hydrogen recoil detector, is new. We had been using an electrochemically etched CR-39 component with manual readout. The new system is automated and has had "superior" results. We are working with our dosimeter processor to develop a site-specific calibration factor. This factor will be used for all of personnel who work with the Am-Be neutron source. We are also in the process of developing a calibration factor for the dosimeters to persons "in the field" who are exposed to skyshine only. The free electron laser (FEL) program finally ran out of money last month. The funding had been tenuous, if not absent, for almost a year. This appears to be pure politics, as the FEL achieved a sustained world record last June for FELs of 155 watts, about 15 times that of any other such laser. Shortly thereafter, funds disappeared. They have recently achieved and sustained 500 watts. Good news, however: with the Navy's blessing, local lawmakers have inserted millions of dollars into next year's defense budget to make the free-electron laser at the Jefferson Lab about 20 times more powerful than it is today. The proposed construction upgrade, which could take several years to complete, is expected to give the Navy a powerful new tool to protect against the growing threat of cruise missiles. This could be interesting - taking a research lab and plugging it solidly in to the Defense Department. Seems we've had problems in Defense related DOE labs recently... For the last month, we have been shut down for semiannual maintenance and machine development. Our technologists have been working diligently removing target assemblies from Hall A and Hall C, as well as preparing a new tritium release system, upgrading piping in the beam dump cooling buildings, and general radiological support for all of the work that happens at this time. There is active planning for a "Hall D" going on, in preparation for funding proposals. It would essentially be the same idea as Hall B, a hall which bends the beam (nanoamps of current) into a dump and uses the resultant synchrotron radiation for experiments. They would be at a location that would use 5 1/2 pass beam, a moderate increase in energy over the 5 pass beam that goes to Hall B. I hope to see many of you at the annual meeting! Scott REGULATIONS/GUIDANCE The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP) Scientific Committee 46-8 has recently completed a draft report entitled "Design Guidelines for Particle Accelerator Facilities". Dr. Ralph Thomas is the Chairman of the Committee. The draft report is viewable as a portable document file on NCRP's website ( www.ncrp.com ). It promises to be a veryuseful update of NCRP 51, and it contains a wealth of data that will certainly prove to be useful to accelerator health physicists. NCRP has at least one other draft document posted that should also be of interest. It is " Evaluation of the Linear Nonthreshold Dose-Response Model". WORKSHOPS AND CONFERENCES Health Physics Society 44th Annual Meeting By now, most of you should have had the opportunity to look through the preliminary program for the Annual Meeting. If you haven't noticed already, the Accelerator Section is sponsoring an oral session Tuesday morning and several members have submitted poster presentations for the session on Monday. The Accelerator Section is honored to have a Morgan Lecturer to kick-off our session. Professor Maurizio Pelliccioni Professor Maurizio Pelliccioni will be the Morgan Lecturer of the Accelerator Section Session at the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Professor Pelliccioni was selected because of his international reputation as an authority on radiation protection for high-energy accelerators. His work in this area has spanned more than thirty years, and we are looking forward to his presentation. Professor Pelliccioni is Head of the Radiation Protection Service of the Italian National Laboratory at Frascati, and has served in this position since 1967. He has held an academic appointment as Lecturer of Health Physics at Rome University since 1970. He has authored over 180 publications as well as 3 books on radiation protection for Italian university students. Recently, he has carried out research work on the design of rem-counters for high-energy neutron measurements at accelerators. He has also performed calculations of dose equivalent conversion coefficients for high-energy radiations. Professor Pelliccioni is a member of several national and international committees dealing with radiation protection, including the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Overall, the meeting should prove to be very informative and give us the opportunity to interact with our colleagues. I look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia. Joe McDonald Radiation Protection Aspects of High Intensity Proton/Deuteron Accelerators A Workshop on "Radiation Protection Aspects of High Intensity Proton/Deuteron Accelerators" will be held from September 27-29, 1999 in Padua, Italy at the Legnaro National Laboratories of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN). This workshop will cover the following topics: Shielding (Calculation, Experiment, Design); Source Term Evaluation; Activation and Induced Radioactivity; Handling and Maintenance of Radioactive Components; Radiation Dosimetry (Neutron Dosimetry, Microdosimetry). The workshop is being held because a new accelerator facility is planned for a proton/deuteron linac with an energy of 100 MeV/amu and a continuous current of 30 mA. It will be used as the primary accelerator of a next-generation ISOL-type facility, aiming at producing neutron rich radioactive ion beams (mainly via neutron-induced fission). This CW high-intensity linac is under study and development within a joint R&D program of the ENEA and the INFN funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research with a view toward construction of a test plant for nuclear waste incineration. Steve Musolino, Lutz Moritz and Joe McDonald have been invited to make presentations at this Workshop. HOW TO SUBSCRIBE / UPDATE YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS To add yourself to the mailing list for the IARPE Newsletter, send an e-mail message to listserv@slac.stanford.edu The body of your message should contain the following command: subscribe iarpe-l Please don't forget to update your e-mail address if you move, change jobs or just change your computing environment. The update consists in canceling the old by 'unsubscribe' and submitting a new subscription, as illustrated below: unsubscribe iarpe-l your_old_email_address subscribe iarpe-l end If the body of your message, as in this example, contains more than a single line/command, it is good practice to finish with the 'end' command, especially if your mailer adds a signature. If you experience problems with subscribing/updating, please send e-mail to emarshall@fnal.gov and I will do it for you. Elaine