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Conference Spotlight
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.”
Cheol Ho Pyeon, Hiroyuki Nakano, Masao Yamanaka, Takahiro Yagi, Tsuyoshi Misawa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 2 | November 2015 | Pages 181-190
Technical Paper | Accelerators | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-111
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
At the Kyoto University Critical Assembly, a series of reactor physics experiments on the accelerator-driven system (ADS) coupled with the fixed-field alternating gradient (FFAG) accelerator are carried out, and the spallation neutrons generated by 100-MeV protons from the FFAG accelerator are successfully injected into the cores. In the ADS experiments, the neutron characteristics of the solid target are investigated through static and kinetic analyses, when the external neutron source of the neutron spectrum (the W, W-Be, or Pb-Bi target) is varied. The results demonstrate that the neutron yield is large with the W target, but a discrepancy is observed between the experiments and the calculations, because the experimental uncertainty of proton monitoring is attributable to defocusing of proton beams. With the use of reaction rate distribution in the core region, the static parameters are estimated fairly well in the analyses of the neutron multiplication and subcritical multiplication factor. In the kinetic experiments, the variation of the solid target used is clearly evident in the prompt neutron decay constant and the subcriticality.