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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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INL makes a case for eliminating ALARA and setting higher dose limits
A report just released by Idaho National Laboratory reviews decades of radiation protection standards and research on the health effects of low-dose radiation and recommends that the current U.S. annual occupational dose limit of 5,000 mrem be maintained without applying ALARA—the “as low as reasonably achievable” regulatory concept first introduced in 1971—below that threshold.
Noting that epidemiological studies “have consistently failed to demonstrate statistically significant health effects at doses below 10,000 mrem delivered at low dose rates,” the report also recommends “future consideration of increasing this limit to 10,000 mrem/year with appropriate cumulative-dose constraints.”
Miltiadis Alamaniotis, Sangkyu Lee, Tatjana Jevremovic
Nuclear Technology | Volume 191 | Number 1 | July 2015 | Pages 41-57
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-75
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radioisotope identification from low-count-rate spectra or spectra obtained through low-resolution detectors constitutes a challenging environment for accurate spectral analysis. The use of intelligent processing algorithms is a significant step in analyzing spectra, conceivably increasing the accuracy of the nuclide identification in such scenarios. This paper introduces an intelligent methodology for automated processing of low-count gamma-ray spectra acquired with a scintillation detector aimed at identifying radioisotope patterns, and it evaluates the performance of this methodology against a set of experimentally acquired gamma-ray spectra. The novel methodology adopts tools from the “artificial intelligence library” to preprocess the spectrum and subsequently identify radioisotopes. In particular, in the preprocessing step, the measured spectrum is divided into equally long energy intervals, whose values are replaced with those computed by a support vector regressor equipped with a linear kernel function. In the next step, the fuzzy logic–based identifier matches spectral peaks with entries in the spectral library, aiming at identifying isotopic signatures in the spectrum. The proposed intelligent methodology is benchmarked against the multiple-linear-regression (MLR) spectrum-fitting algorithm. Assessment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in identifying isotopes compared with the MLR algorithm by significantly reducing the number of false detections and improving correct detection performance. Furthermore, the proposed methodology exhibits an overall higher detection sensitivity (by 13.3%) and precision (by 46.8%) than those obtained with MLR.