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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Mohamed Yehia Habash, Nabil M. A. Ayad, Abd Elhady A. Ammar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 9 | September 2022 | Pages 1484-1495
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2035645
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In nuclear facilities, it is very significant for the monitoring and control system to accurately monitor and detect harmful radiation inside and outside the nuclear facility in a real-time manner to protect personnel, visitors, and the environment. This is because of the effect of ionizing radiations on the genetic material deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA contained in the human body and other living organisms. As a result, harmful genetic mutations can be caused and passed on to the next generations. In this study, a framework based on wireless sensors and actors’ networks is proposed to monitor the radiation levels inside and outside the nuclear facility. The sensors network is used to sense the environment, and its measurements are sent to a central device which makes the necessary analysis and passes this information to the monitoring and control system of the nuclear facility. A sensor reading validation algorithm is used to validate the sensors’ readings before being sent to the monitoring and control units; that is, to distinguish between the real events and the sensors’ faults, and finally, to have accurate and trusted measurements. After the sensors’ measurements are validated, they are tested against threshold values to detect new events and trigger the alarm system of the monitoring and control system to alert the operator to take corrective actions. Finally, the framework includes a system to enable the workers and visitors to be notified about the radiation levels in their and nearby areas. This technique is tested and investigated using the Castalia simulator. The simulation results are of great importance and show high event detection accuracy, low communication overheads between sensor devices, and low power consumption for the sensor devices.