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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
Adam Davis, Donald J. Dudziak, Drew E. Kornreich
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 178 | Number 1 | September 2014 | Pages 42-56
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-10
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Photon buildup factors provide a convenient method for radiation protection professionals to calculate dose and exposure behind various shielding configurations. Examination of buildup factors can also provide insight into the behavior of photons in these shields. Recent work has developed dual-layer buildup factors for several shielding configurations and a limited number of energies while slant-path buildup factors have been developed for single-layer shields. This work develops slant-path buildup factors for slab-geometric, dual-layer shields comprising polyethylene and lead at 25 energies conforming to the energies used in the buildup factor standard ANSI/ANS-6.4.3-1991 (W2001), “Gamma-Ray Attenuation Coefficients and Buildup Factors for Engineering Materials,” between 10 keV and 10 MeV. Further, the increased energy resolution of the calculations performed in this work allows the energy at which the previously identified “buildup reversal” phenomenon occurs to be more precisely identified. The effect of mesh spacing and quadrature resolution on fluence through the shields is also considered.