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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The RAIN scale: A good intention that falls short
Radiation protection specialists agree that clear communication of radiation risks remains a vexing challenge that cannot be solved solely by finding new ways to convey technical information.
Earlier this year, an article in Nuclear News described a new radiation risk communication tool, known as the Radiation Index, or, RAIN (“Let it RAIN: A new approach to radiation communication,” NN, Jan. 2025, p. 36). The authors of the article created the RAIN scale to improve radiation risk communication to the general public who are not well-versed in important aspects of radiation exposures, including radiation dose quantities, units, and values; associated health consequences; and the benefits derived from radiation exposures.
Byoungil Jeon, Jinhwan Kim, Myungkook Moon
Nuclear Technology | Volume 209 | Number 1 | January 2023 | Pages 1-14
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2096389
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Radioisotope identification (RIID) is a representative application of deep learning for radiation measurements. Deep learning-based RIID models have been implemented in various types of radiation detectors; however, very few of these models have been interpreted using explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods. This paper presents an explanation of a deep learning–based RIID model for a plastic scintillation detector. The RIID task is defined as a multilabel binary classification problem, and the dataset is generated using a random sampling procedure. The identification performance is verified using experimental data. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the RIID models increased with the increase in the total counts of the dataset. Additionally, XAI methods are implemented, and their explanatory performance is verified for the spectral input. The domain knowledge of RIID for the plastic scintillation detector is that patterns near the Compton edge can be used as evidence for the existence of radioisotopes. Among the implemented XAI methods, integrated gradient and layerwise relevance propagation exhibited concurrence with the domain knowledge, with the Shapley value explanation method presenting the most reliable results.