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Accelerator
Radiation Safety Newsletter |
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An Official Publication of the Health Physics
Society's |
Fourth Quarter 2008 / |
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FROM THE OFFICERS The President-Elect’s Message What will you be doing on July 14, 2009? I hope you will
be attending the Accelerator Special Session at the annual Health Physics
Society (HPS) meeting in The Past President's
Message Accelerator Section webpage Q/A link: I should say “good news everyone!” I have been talking about our own Q/A link for the Accelerator health physics question for about a year now. Health Physics Society board of directors has accepted our proposal. An accelerator health physics category has been added to the Ask The Experts (ATE) page of the HPS webpage (Ask The Experts) There are several subcategories including radiation fields, radiation shielding, shielding materials, induced radioactivity in material media and environment media, radiation damage, instrumentation, radiation safety interlocks and questions regarding regulatory issues relevant to accelerators. The Editor's Message IRPA 12 in The Accelerator Section of the Health Physics Society in combination with the Health Physics Society itself sent me as their delegate to the 12th Congress of the International Radiation Protection Association (IRPA).� The Congress was very well attended (though a bit disorganized). The venue was great.� We met at the end of October which is the middle of our fall but the middle of spring in Buenos Ares.� The weather was fantastic with average temperatures around 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit.� The trees and flowers were blooming.� The native population, as well as the tourists, were enjoying the spring atmosphere. |
Also of
interest OFFICERS
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OTHER NEWS Operational Health Physics
Course: Second Reminder
We look forward to seeing you in
Erice, News from Fermilab (Kamran Vaziri) The Fermilab accelerators shutdown, originally scheduled to start in September 2008, was postponed to mid-June, 2009 in order to maximize running time before the cessation of Collider operations planned for October 1, 2010. As I reported previously, the goal is to collect as much data as possible to search for the elusive Higgs_boson. For FY 2008 integrated luminosity (average of the two Collider detectors) totaled 1789.5 pb-1, 105% of the design goal and 136% of that delivered in FY 2007. Over 48 weeks of scheduled operations, a total of 5032 store hours was delivered, 100% of the design goal. Total on-line average integrated luminosity for Run II stood at 4.993 fb-1 as of 9/29/08. Last time we reported the latest Tevatron luminosity record was 292.4E30/cm2/s in the first quarter of 2007. However, the Tevatron improvements did not stop there. Intense effort to improve the machine's performance continues. The latest average luminosity record is 355.1E30/cm2/s. All these achievements were made in the face of four months of forced furloughs and impending involuntary reductions in force in 2008. L. Scott Walker The LANSCE accelerator (originally called LAMPF) is currently +40 years old.� Full beam power was achieved in 1972.� Like FERMI and SLAC, RF equipment, vacuum systems, computer control, injection technology, initial acceleration, water cooling etc. is quite out of date compared to modern technology.� The net result is that beam delivery time suffers from system failures.� |
FROM THE CORRESPONDENTS News from Spallation
Neutron Source, Oak Ridge National Lab Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) has completed a very successful operating year with ten commissioned instruments (two were added within the last month) and an average operating power just less than 700 kW.� The week of Christmas 2008 saw beam availability level at 95% - we suspect it is not entirely coincidental that the machine runs more reliably (up to a point) when no one is around performing maintenance tasks that are promised to be “transparent to operations.”� Most of the active instruments are still aligning, adding detectors, calibrating, or running samples submitted by internal or closely associated external users, thus, the number of samples handled is much smaller than it will be in future years.� News from the Center for Advanced Microstructures and
Devices, It appears that the economic downturn has
affected CAMD more than one would have ever predicted. We have been forced to
cut our budget by 12 � percent.� Since
one half of the year has already elapsed, the true cut is closer to 25
percent.� As most of you know, my
safety budget is already bare-bones and simply cannot take any additional
cuts.� At the beginning of the fiscal
year [July 1, 2008], my budget was cut by 29% from previous years.� We all know from our personal lives that
inflation has also crept up by as much as 12 percent. |
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If you wish to contact the editor of this newsletter click here |
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