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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Wenyu Cheng, Linlin Zeng, He Zhou, Jie Liang, Ke Deng, Qin Zhang, Wei Liu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 3 | March 2025 | Pages 500-512
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2338508
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium causes internal dose hazards to humans. Currently, tritium in the environment mainly comes from nuclear power plants, and tritiated water (HTO) is the main form of liquid emission. Therefore, online monitoring activity of tritium in the aqueous medium is vital for protecting human health, and it can warn of the operation status of nuclear power plants. In this paper, we present an improved structure of plastic scintillating fiber (PSF) and a PSF array design, and the detection parameters of PSF arrays with different radii and lengths under different radius detection chambers are simulated using Geant4. Based on the simulation results, the detector is designed, and the minimum detectable activity concentration (MDAC) of the detector is calculated. With calculated MDACs down to 3.09 Bq/L, the proposed design can meet the Chinese requirements for HTO release of inland nuclear power plants of <100 Bq∙L−1. Therefore, the detector designed with a PSF array can be applied to online monitoring of tritium in the aqueous medium.