A LONG-TERM FIELD TEST OF A LARGE VOLUME IONIZATION CHAMBER BASED AREA RADIATION MONITORING SYSTEM DEVELOPED AT KAERI

Abstract

An Area Radiation Monitoring System (ARMS) ionization chamber, which had an 11.8 L active volume, was fabricated and performance-tested at KAERI. Low leakage currents, linearities at low and high dose rates were achieved from performance tests. The correlation coefficients between the ionization currents and the dose rates are 1 at high dose rate and 0.99 at low dose rate. In this study, an integration-type ARMS ionization chamber was tested over a year for an evaluation of its long-term stability at a radioisotope (RI) repository of the Young-gwang nuclear power plant. The standard deviation of dose rate of 1 day data and over a 100-days mean value were 6.2 μR/h and 2.9 μR/h, respectively. The fabricated ARMS ionization chamber showed stable performance from the results of the long-term tests. Design and performance characteristics of the fabricated ionization chamber for the ARMS from performance-tests are also addressed.