The Effectiveness of a Whole Body Counter During and After an Accident Situation at Nuclear Facilities

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Abstract
Nuclear facilities must have the capability of rapid assessment of body burdens of radionuclides as part of their emergency preparedness plans. A recent incident at a commercial nuclear plant has shown that the whole body counters in force were most useful in achieving the above, but incidents of improper data acquisition and analysis resulted in questionable assignments of body burden. If this incident had been more severe, there could have been significant errors in dose assessment. With respect to quality control, the areas of concern were background subtraction techniques, personnel entrance procedure, counter location, and electronics stability. Whole body counting is a useful methodology for internal dose assessment if attention is paid to procedure and generalized operations. Recommendations are presented to aid in acquisition of reliable results during routine operations as well as emergency situations.

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