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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
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.”
Jonathan Naish, Frances Fox, Zamir Ghani, Michael Loughlin, Lee Packer, Andrew Turner
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2015 | Pages 299-307
Technical Paper | Accelerators | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-132
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Applied Radiation Physics Group at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, United Kingdom, has developed and applied state-of-the-art radiation mapping methods and tools. The tools enable complex shielding calculations in and around fusion devices, both during and after plasma operations, to inform on associated radiation fields for operational, maintenance, and remote handling scenarios, for example. Here, we present a description and application of those tools to produce radiation maps to support (a) the Joint European Torus (JET) operational safety case for a new D-T campaign that is foreseen for 2020, with neutron emission rates in excess of 1018 n/s and a total neutron yield up to 1.7 × 1021 n, and (b) the ITER device.
Three tools are presented in this paper: An automated global variance reduction tool applied to the JET facility; a portable bounding surface source referred to as a mesh source, which has been applied to activated materials; and a smeared source routine, which enables the calculation of integral fields associated with moving sources. These tools are demonstrated, in combination, to produce the integrated three-dimensional dose map of an activated divertor component being transported through a path within the ITER facility.