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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Moving past Sayre’s Law on low-dose radiation
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
So, President Trump has just kicked the low-dose radiation hornets’ nest.
Specifically, his recently signed executive order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission” calls for the NRC to “reconsider reliance” on the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory and the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) standard for radiation protection.
This directive will certainly reignite a vociferous debate within the radiation research community over the continued efficacy of using LNT as the basis for protecting the public and the environment, a community that has been wracked with controversy on this matter for the last few years.
I must admit that whenever the low-dose issue comes up, my first thoughts always go to Sayre’s Law.
Xiangpeng Meng, Yuanyuan Liu, Bin Wu, Jianping Cheng, Li Wang, Yu Wang, Ning Su
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 4 | April 2022 | Pages 753-760
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1945358
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Detecting the activity of 210Pb in the human skull by counting its 46.5-keV gamma rays in vivo is a promising method to reconstruct one’s cumulative radon intake, based on which associated lung cancer risk can be evaluated. However, this technique is strongly challenged by the background radiation level, which can be largely categorized as room background and subject background. In this work, we quantitatively assess the performance of the phoswich detector in suppressing background radiation resulting from 40K ubiquitously present in human subjects under in vivo measurements using Monte Carlo simulations. We first determined the region of interest for 210Pb gamma-ray detection to be 31 to 61 keV and focused on the background level inside this region caused by two 40K decay processes. It is found that the 1.46-MeV gamma-ray–led background can be reduced by 40% by the phoswich detector operating in anticoincidence mode whereas the 1.31-MeV beta-particle–led background is almost unaffected. This observation is understood through the dependence of the anticoincidence efficiency on the incident gamma-ray energies. Our results suggest that the 1.31-MeV beta-particle–led background is much larger and harder to suppress than the 1.46-MeV gamma-ray–led background, and they call for more investigations in the background reduction techniques for 210Pb in vivo measurement.