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) ====================================================================== December, 1993/January, 1994 Vol. #2, #8 ====================================================================== OFFICERS ====================================================================== President: Geoff Stapleton, SSC Past President: Ralph Thomas, LLNL President Elect: Nisy Ipe, SLAC Secretary: Bob May, CEBAF Treasurer (designate): Joe McDonald, PNL Directors (1 year): Paula Trinoskey, LLNL Gerry Fallon, MIT BATES Directors (2 year): Jerry Miller, LAMPF Carter Ficklen, CEBAF Directors (3 year): Steve Musolino, BNL De Vaughn Nelson >From the Editor Lutz Moritz ====================================================================== Apparently our organization has matured to the extent that we are engaging in official correspondence with other individuals and organizations. It has therefore been found necessary that we have an official logo and letterhead! Steve Musolino has suggested a competition among members to create the logo and letterhead, and our president Geoff Stapleton has agreed to donate an SSCL t-shirt (a rapidly appreciating item of accelerator memorabilia) as a prize for the winning entry. Members of the Section Executive Board will serve as judges. Please send all entries to Steve by April~1, 1994, so that the judging can take place at the April meeting in Arlington, Texas. His address is: Steve Musolino Brookhaven National Laboratory Building 1005-4 P.O. Box 5000 Upton, New York 11973 E-mail: Our treasurer, Joe McDonald has asked me to remind all Accelerator Section members to make sure that they pay their dues. For those of you who are members of HPS, this is most easily done by checking off the 'Accelerator' box under 'Section Membership' and remembering to add the extra $US 5.00 to the HPS membership fee. If you have already renewed your HPS membership but forgotten to include the Accelerator Section dues or if you are a member of one of the IRPA affiliated societies, you may submit your dues directly using the form appended to this newsletter. We would like to encourage all subscribers to the IARPE Newsletter to become HPS Accelerator Section members. Although we would obviously like you to also become members of HPS, those of you who are members of one of the IRPA affiliated societies can join the Accelerator Section without becoming HPS members (the fee then is $US 6.00). The news of Tony Sullivan's retirement took us all by surprise. Tony is of the 'old school', and his way of performing back-of-the-envelope calculations show an amazing insight into the physical processes which form the basis of radiation transport and activation. His new book stands as a testament to his wonderful intuition; in a 150 pages he provides 'recipes' for the solution of more problems anyone working in accelerator radiation safety is likely to encounter in a life-time. >From the President Geoff Stapleton ====================================================================== Firstly I would like to deal with two matters of business: 1) The midyear meeting of the Executive Board and Section. This has traditionally been held at the HPS midyear meetings (some tradition - we have only held about two midyear meetings in the section's history) but as a consequence of budget restrictions on travel and the likely poor turn-out at Albany it has been agreed by the section officers to hold the main mid-year meeting at Arlington, Texas to correspond with the ICRS-8 to be held April 24-28 1994. It is felt that more section members will be attending the Arlington meeting than the one at Albany. The Arlington meeting is important because it will enable us to finalize all the arrangements for the summer meeting in San Francisco. However, the Secretary, Bob May will be attending the Albany HPS meeting together with the treasurer Joe McDonald, and Bob has agreed to convene a short meeting of the Section on my behalf, assuming there was sufficient attendance at Albany. Topics that might be covered by an Albany meeting would be financial and membership matters and also consideration of various activities in progress. 2) I also want to reinforce the recent communication requesting contributions to the scientific session of the SF meeting. We have had excellent material presented at the last two main meetings (Columbus and Atlanta) so we must continue to sustain our record. The next meeting at SF will, I have no doubt, be one of those landmark events that we can look back on with great pleasure and interest. Recently, laboratories in the US devoted to research using high-energy accelerators have suffered as a result of congressional economies. Whether this is temporary or whether it is a permanent change is hard to tell at the moment. But what is quite certain, in a scene where doubt is frequently cast on the value of such research, is the resounding contribution of accelerator radiation studies to increasing our understanding of radiation protection. This assertion is easily verified by a glance at the publications from institutions such as Fermilab and CERN. Further to my reference to CERN, I want to mention the recent retirement of Tony Sullivan. Tony is certainly one of those who have contributed greatly to the body of knowledge in the field of accelerator radiation protection and his recent book is a jewel (A Guide to Radiation and Radioactivity Levels Near High Energy Particle Accelerators - Nucl Tech Pub). I would like to take this opportunity to extend to Tony, on behalf of the membership of the Section, our very best wishes for a most happy retirement. Tony, please keep in touch. Geoff Stapleton UPDATE ON MEETINGS Nisy Ipe ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RADIATION SHIELDING: The 8th International Conference on Radiation Shielding (sponsored by the ANS) will be held in Arlington, Texas, from April 24-28, 1994 at the Arlington Hilton. The following topics will be covered: Shielding materials and radiation effects, Sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, PC applications, Transport methods, Hiroshima dosimetry discrepancy study, Radiation field characterization, Shield analysis, Monte Carlo methods, Geometry description software, Waste management, Aircraft and space radiation, Accelerators, Pressure vessel dosimetry, Spent fuel storage and transportation, Benchmark experiments and integral tests, Space power shielding, Medical applications, Radiation streaming and skyshine, Fusion neutronics, Fluence-to-dose conversion factors, and point kernel techniques. For further information, contact Dr. Nolan Hertel, Fax: 404-894-3733 Phone: 404-894-3717, E-Mail: . HPS ANNUAL MEETING: The 39th annual HPS meeting will be held in San Francisco from June 26-30, 1994. The meeting will be held at the San Francisco Hilton and Towers. An entire day will be devoted to Accelerators. The deadline for abstract submission is January 14, 1994. Non-HPS members may obtain copies of the abstract form from Bob May . Please choose the code AA on your abstract form if you wish to present a paper at the Accelerator Session. Dr. Arthur Bienenstock, Associate Director and Head, Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory will deliver the keynote address at the Accelerator Session. Artie (as he is fondly referred to at SSRL) has a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University and has had a distinguished career. In addition to serving as Director of SSRL (since 1978), he is also Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Stanford University. Apart from the tour of the Advanced Light Source at the night out on June 30th, there will also be a technical tour of SLAC (including SSRL) on July 1. And now for the most important part....tours and attractions include Alcatraz Island, China Town, Golden Gate Park, cable cars, Pier 39, Sausalito, Muir Woods, Marine World Africa USA (for the young at heart), Napa Wine Country, Monterey Peninsula, Yosemite National Park and much more. For the nature lovers among you, contact Alberto Fasso who has explored every nook and corner of the Bay Area during his sabbatical at SLAC (weekends of course!) to find out about quiet and scenic get-aways. Nisy Ipe NEWS FROM IARPENL CORRESPONDENTS ====================================================================== News from CEBAF Steve Corneliussen, ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CEBAF Managers Receive Motorola Quality Training A Focused Motorola Management Institute was held for middle and senior managers and the Quality Advisory Council at the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) during the week of November 29 -- the first Motorola training at a DOE laboratory following the two sessions for DOE top management at Motorola University during July and August. The purpose was to continue building a management and leadership team dedicated to establishing a culture of quality in the organization. The training and its terminology stem from Motorola's own quest for quality, a multi-year process that included the company's receiving the first Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1988. A key training objective was to learn how best to match customer expectations and CEBAF performance. Participants also sought to understand the role of the leader in developing a customer focus with quality as the key strategy, and to identify tools and metrics (objective, quantified measurements) that can assist in developing a quality culture. Specific training topics included total customer satisfaction, metrics development, process mapping, managing change, and "six sigma quality," the performance goal of less than four defects per million opportunities. News from CERN Manfred Hoefert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- With 1993 rapidly coming to an end the usual parties are being organized. This year is however special as one of the giants of accelerator health physics, Tony Sullivan, has organized his private festivity on the occasion of his much too early retirement. Speaking in the name of our accelerator community I would like to wish him all the best for his future. Those who knew Tony loved him well admiring his intelligence, honesty and loyalty in the spirit of which he performed his work always in his particular way. It will be difficult to find a successor of his stature. Nevertheless my group had the nowadays rare chance for a recruitment, filling the vacant post with a young specialist in radiation protection: Miss Catherine Vaerman of Belgian nationality. It was interesting to see that Catherine won the competition for the post against 32 other male and female applicants capturing all the votes. Catherine will hopefully start soon with the group. At the end of this year we shall see our calibration facility rising from the ashes. Christian Raffnsoe and his team have rebuilt what had been destroyed to make room for a new CERN hostel in the old ISOLDE premises. The new calibration facility will be more practical than the old one but due to the more restricted room we have to live with a greater scattering, in particular for neutron calibrations. To do this reconstruction in such a short time is nearly a miracle. My sincere thanks go to Christian and his collaborators. The results of the stray field measurements are coming in and show an excellent correspondence with MC-calculations. Graham Stevenson presented the CERN results to an EC contractors meeting in Brussels while I am reporting to EURADOS at the end of January in Luxemburg. Our radiation facility will again run in the new year with many participants interested to test the behavior of their old and new devices for the dosimetry of air crews in the defined stray field CERN can provide. CERN's Radiation Protection Group would like to extend the best wishes for a merry X-mas and a successful 1994 to all readers of the IARPE Newsletter. News from SSCL Jeff Bull ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The bill officially terminating the SSC project was signed into law on October 29, 1993. With a few strokes of a pen, over ten years and an untold number of man-hours worth of work was put on hold indefinitely, very likely forever. At the moment, the future of the SSC site and its facilities are unclear. The law terminating the project required that the Department of Energy (DOE) prepare a plan for maximizing the investment made so far in the SSC. Many proposals have been submitted, from completing the Linac for use as a proton- beam therapy facility to using a portion of the collider tunnel for double beta-decay experiments. While this effort is going on, the process of closing down continues. As of December 17, a total of 650 employees had received their termination notices, with the next round of notices not expected until after the new year. As an indication of how things are going, the decision was made to mothball the Low Energy Booster tunnel (85% complete) and fill in the trenches already excavated. The final report on recommendations for the site is not due until July, 1994, by which time most of the employees will have been laid off. As the laboratory's mission has changed from building an accelerator to closing out a project, so has the focus of the Radiation Control Office (RCO). In addition to looking for new employment, we are in the process of developing the procedures needed for termination of the project, including closure documentation for wherever radiation was planned, used, or produced. This includes the collection and disposal of radioactive sources and the writing of procedures to certify that areas are contamination-free when the laboratory vacates the premises. A major portion of the closure effort is the documentation of the work accomplished here up to October 1993. Included in that effort, is a substantial amount of work in the fields of accelerator health physics and radiation physics. Already, a summary document is being prepared that includes all the innovative designs and solutions developed at the laboratory, including several pages on radiation protection. Beyond that, the RCO plans to produce a comprehensive document, detailing all aspects of radiation protection at the SSCL, including policies, procedures, shielding calculations, activation estimates, audit procedures, instrumentation, measurements, the personnel access control system, and training materials developed at SSCL. The fate of this document will rest with the DOE. Just prior to the cancellation of the project, the development of the General Employee Radiation Training (GERT) was completed as required by the DOE. The course is one hour in length, featuring a short video produced by the SSCL and highlighted by animation of protons moving in the collider tunnel. A review of the material immediately follows the video, concluding with a comprehensive 10 question exam. The materials are of a professional quality, all produced by the in-house graphics and technical publications group. A preview of the course was given in late August to an audience composed of individuals with varying degrees of knowledge about radiation and its effects. Comments from the audience indicated that the presentation was highly regarded and their suggestions for modifications were incorporated to reflect the specialized nature of accelerator radiation protection. It was the intention of the SSCL to make available all the materials to other DOE facilities, however, in light of closure of the project, distribution will be at the discretion of the DOE. If you would like a copy or more information, contact: Sara Galpin at (214)-708-1250 (E-mail: ). News from SLAC Vashek Vylet Stan Mao ---------------------------------------------------------------------- EXPERIMENT E143 Experiment E143 is scheduled to run from November 6, 1993 to January 31,1994 in End Station A of SLAC. This experiment measures deep inelastic electron scattering of polarized electrons from targets of polarized protons and neutrons to determine the distribution of spin carried by quarks in the nucleons. The polarized beam is provided by the SLC polarized electron source equipped with a new laser for long pulse operation. The target is made of frozen ammonia held at 1K and in a 50 kG magnetic field with microwave power introduced to pump the nuclear spins into polarization. The spin distribution of the quarks is determined by measuring the asymmetry for electron scattering in two conditions: longitudinal asymmetry and transverse asymmetry. >From the radiation protection point of view, great care was taken in designing the Beam Containment System. EGS4 and other Monte Carlo transport codes were used to design the radiation shielding, since the geometry of the problem was sufficiently complicated and the knowledge of the scattered electron energy and spatial distributions was desired. Two radiation surveys were performed and their results indicate that the shielding design is adequate. (Stan Mao) NEW REPORTS/PUBLICATIONS N.E.Ipe and A.Fasso, ``Impact of Gas Bremsstrahlung on Synchrotron Radiation Beamline Shielding at the Advanced Photon Source, submitted to the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Radiation Shielding, Arlington, Texas, April 24-28, 1994, also SLAC PUB 6410, January 1994. (Available from ) N.E.Ipe, D.R.Haeffner, E.E.Alp, S.C.Davey, R.J.Dejus, U.Hahn, B.Lai, K.J.Randall,and D.Shu, ``User's Guide to Radiation Beamline Shielding at the Advanced Photon Source'', APS Technical Bulletin, ANL-APS-TB7, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, December 1993. (Available from the APS Publications Office). (Nisy Ipe) News from TRIUMF L. Moritz ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Although the official drive for funding the KAON project at TRIUMF continues with the formation of international 'participation panels', the recent change in the Canadian federal government after the November election and the announcement of a CDN$ 46 billion deficit (instead of the projected 32 billion) are ominous signs. It is also felt here that the cancellation of the SSC is not good news as it appears highly unlikely that a US government which does not support a major domestic initiative would support a foreign one. The KAON funding formula depended heavily on significant contributions from the US and Japan. So for the first time since the initial proposal for the KAON project, there are serious proposals for 'alternative futures' for TRIUMF. In fact there is rather feverish activity to prepare a request for funding ISAC, an on-line isotope separator which would produce beams of radioactive ions from a target/ion source bombarded by 200-500 MeV protons. There would be provision to accelerate the radioactive nuclei to an energy of up to 10 MeV per amu to allow studies of nuclear reactions important for understanding astrophysical phenomena. The TRIUMF facility would differ from existing ones such as ISOLDE at CERN in that the intensity of the beams would be higher by at least an order of magnitude. The radiological safety requirements for servicing the highly radioactive target/ion source and the contaminated beam transport systems are expected to be severe. Much of the design effort is going into remote handling for the targets and providing adequate isolation around those areas where high levels of loose radioactivity are expected. Another possible project for TRIUMF is as the site for a proposed Canadian synchrotron light source. This project is being moved by the Canadian synchrotron light user community and therefore depends to some extent on convincing them that the accelerator expertise and research facility infrastructure at TRIUMF outweigh the inconvenience of travelling to the Pacific coast of Canada when most of the users are presently located in eastern Canada. The first run of Experiment 613 using tritium has just been completed. This experiment is investigating the emission of muonic hydrogen isotopes from the surface of solid hydrogen isotope mixtures. The latest run was looking for muonic tritium emission from hydrogen- tritium and deuterium-tritium mixtures. The total inventory of tritium in the experimental apparatus was 10 TBq. Between runs the tritium is stored on depleted uranium getter beds. The worst case scenario for an accident was assumed to be a craning mishap where the uranium getter beds were breached while hot, releasing the entire inventory of tritium and converting it to HTO. The (committed) dose equivalent rate to an individual in the experimental hall immediately after such an accident was estimated to be 12 mSv/h. This was deemed sufficiently high that crane movements above the experimental set-up were restricted and an emergency response plan was prepared which covered various possible failure modes of the experimental apparatus and included an evacuation plan. Happily this run of the experiment was completed without incident and the bioassay and contamination monitoring program indicated that none of the tritium escaped. FROM THE MEMBERSHIP ====================================================================== The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) has set a world record of about three million watts of controlled fusion power. The first high-power shot occurred at 11:08 p.m. on Thursday night, December 9, 1993. This was the world's first magnetic fusion experiment in a tokamak utilizing a plasma made of equal parts of deuterium and tritium - the mix required for practical amounts of fusion power. While the tokamak is not usually classified as an accelerator, it does accelerate particles (electrons and ions) and comes closer to the definition of an accelerator than probably any other device of interest to the Health Physics Society. I thought the accelerator community would like to hear some positive news after all the dreary news about the SSC. The successful test does not mean that fusion is out of the woods in terms of long-term funding, but it should help to demonstrate that our scientific community is delivering on the long-lead time, high-cost experimental projects. I hope the accelerator community is as happy as we are in the fusion community at meeting this milestone. It is expected that the 10 MW goal will be reached before the end of FY94. (Joe Stencel) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- We welcome the following new subscribers: Patrick Beyer Joseph A. Doucet Keith B. Welch John Steven Kramer Scott Kitchen Twilly Cannon George R. Cicotte CLOSING THOUGHTS ====================================================================== "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Attributed to Sir Ernest Rutherford. Cut here: ______________________________________________________________________ HEALTH PHYSICS SOCIETY ACCELERATOR SECTION ANNUAL DUES PAYMENT The HPS Accelerator Section has initiated a system for dues collection through the Health Physics Society. Please complete the following form. Membership is available to HPS members and IRPA affiliates only. 1994 Accelerator Section Dues $5 ($6 IRPA affiliates) ______________________________________________________________________ Please check only one: ______ VISA ______ MASTERCARD _______ CHECK ENCLOSED (Payable to HPS) Card #: ______________________________ Expiry Date: _____________ Card Holders Name: _________________________________(Please Print) Signature: ______________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ Full Mailing Address: __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ Telephone:__________________FAX:__________________ E-Mail Address:___________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ All payments must be made in U.S. dollars and drawn on U.S. banks. U.S. Postal Money Orders, U.S. Travelers Checks, Mastercard, and Visa will also be accepted. Return this form to: Heide Rohland, Membership Manager HPS Accelerator Section Health Physics Society 8000 Westpark Drive, Suite 130 McLean, VA 22102 USA