High-performance Dust-radiation Monitoring System by Simultaneous Discrimination of Alpha and Beta Rays

• Volume 49 Number 2 August 2000

• Power Systems

AUTHORS

OVERVIEW

A dust-radiation monitoring system is installed in every nuclear power plant to collect dust suspended in the air and to monitor radiation levels in all areas inside the plant for radiation exposure control and work management purposes. The existing types of radiation monitoring systems are as sensitive to natural radioactivity as to artificial radioactivity, so it is necessary to develop a monitoring system that can discriminate between the two types of radioactivity whenever a change is detected in the measured radiation level. Since the natural radioactivity depends primarily on radon that radiates alpha and beta rays, and its decay-product nuclides, we have developed a system to significantly improve the monitoring performance of artificial radioactivity. We achieved this by concurrently measuring the alpha and beta rays with a single detector in order to discriminate natural radiation according to the ratio of radioactivity between the two types of rays. The dust sampler is built as an autonomous distributed system capable of operating independently. For information monitoring, we have adopted a cutting-edge data-control system consisting of a high-performance information control server and a general-purpose LAN. This system is open and highly scalable and can provide trend data monitoring and central-control of field equipment and devices.

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RELEVANT SITES

	Power & Industrial Systems
	Information & Control Systems Div.
	The Hitachi Hyoron (Japanese Only)

KEYWORDS

Dust Monitoring, Radiation Monitoring, Radon, Alpha Ray, Beta Ray

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