Planning Tools for Estimating Radiation Exposure at the National Ignition Facility

A set of computational tools was developed to help estimate and minimize potential radiation exposure to workers from material activation in the National Ignition Facility (NIF). AAMI (Automated ALARA-MCNP Interface) provides an efficient, automated mechanism to perform the series of calculations required to create dose rate maps for the entire facility with minimal manual user input. NEET (NIF Exposure Estimation Tool) is a web application that combines the information computed by AAMI with a given shot schedule to compute and display the dose rate maps as a function of time. AAMI and NEET are currently used as work planning tools to determine stay-out times for workers following a given shot or set of shots, and to help in estimating integrated doses associated with performing various maintenance activities inside the target bay. Dose rate maps of the target bay were generated following a low-yield 10¹⁶ D-Tshot and will be presented in this paper.