Skin dose contamination conversion coefficients. Benchmark with three simulation codes

Abstract

Handling of radioactive material by operators can lead to contamination at the surface of the skin in case of an accident. The quantification of the dose received by the skin due to a contamination scenario is performed by means of dedicated dose coefficients as it is the case for other radiation protection dose quantities described in the literature. However, most available coefficients do not match realistic scenarios according to state-of-the-art of science and technology. Therefore, this work deals with dedicated dose conversion factors for skin contamination. Since there is an increasing demand on dose coefficients in general, these specific coefficients can be used for various calculations in radiation protection. In this work a method to evaluate such coefficients for the skin contamination dose related to photons, electrons, positrons, alpha and neutron particles is proposed. The coefficients are generated using Monte-Carlo simulations with three well established calculation codes (FLUKA, MCNP, and GEANT4). The results of the various codes are compared against each other for benchmarking purposes. The new dose coefficients allow the computation of the skin received dose, in the case of skin contamination scenario of an individual, taking into account the decay radiation of the radionuclides of interest. To benchmark the quantity derived here, comparisons of radionuclide contamination doses to the skin using the VARSKIN code available in the literature are performed with the results of this work.

A Monte Carlo Study on Skin Dose Contamination Coefficients of 252Cf Radionuclide

“…al. The quantitative and qualitative agreement has been observed between these two class results [7]. The only difference could be the methods used to calculate the dose rate and SDCC.…”

“…Given the following equation, the Skin dose contamination of the 252 Cf radionuclide using SDCC for wide energy regions will be extracted [7]:…”

“…When the skin is contaminated it is necessary to quantify the dose received by the skin and its coe cients which is our main concern in this paper. Some tools allow the assessment of skin contamination dose and neutrons and gamma photons spectra such as MCNPX monte carlo simulation code [6][7]. In this paper, a new method to construct data for skin contamination dose is proposed.…”

A novel tool for predicting the dose distribution of non‐sealed 188Re (Rhenium) resin in non‐melanoma skin cancers (NMSC) patients

“…To assess the potential differences related to other MC approaches, we calculated the skin dose for 188 Re considering its spectrum and interpolating the data reported in Table 3 of Appendix of the recently published paper 21 . Limited to this experimental set‐up, the percentage relative differences on calculated skin contamination dose using MCNP and GEANT4 resulted in 0.55% and 0.48% higher than the one calculated using FLUKA, respectively.…”

Transfer functions for QA /QB international regulatory limits for the safe transport of radioactive materials

“…Q C has been updated to include the last ICRP updates, ICRP 130-151 [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Q D has been updated and split into two values Q D,skin and Q D,ing that rely respectively on skin dose due to contamination [12] and ingestion dose taken from ICRP 130-151. Q E has been updated to comply with ICRP 144 [13].…”