• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.146-152
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• 2009

The steel-tube is exposed to a radiation from X-ray source. The transmitted radiation is detected by a detector, usually film or more recently an imaging plate(IP) of Computed Radiography(CR). The detected radiation overlaps the region of both sides of the object. The radiographic images reflect the projections of the rays, passing twice through both external and internal tube material. Nonlinear distortion due to the radioactive transmission and geometric disposition also appears on images. In this paper, an analytical approach is presented to achieve image reconstruction from the steel-tube CR images. Parameters related to radiation and measuring structure, such as intensities, absorption in material and geometric specifications linked with the collimating components, are calculated and identified in order to construct the renoval images for twofold regions of circle-type steel tubes. A correction procedure for region recovery most similar to the true tube is designed. The application of this approach on CR images is shown and reconstructed results are discussed.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.171-179
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• 2002

The three-dimensional long-range dispersion model has been developed to understand the characteristics of the transport and diffusion of radioactive materials released into atmosphere. The model is designed to compute air concentration and ground deposition at distances up to some thousands of kilometers from the source point in horizontal direction. The vertical turbulent motion is considered separately within the mixing layer and above the mixing layer. The test simulation was performed In the area of Northeast Asia. The release point was assumed in the east part of China. The calculated concentration distributions art mainly advected toward the southeast part of release point by the wind fields. The developed model will be used to estimate the radiological consequences against a nuclear accident. The model will be supplemented by the comparative study using the data of the long-range field experiments.

• Journal of Radiation Protection and Research
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• v.41 no.4
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• pp.368-372
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• 2016

Background: Methodologies for a series of radiological consequence assessments show a distinctive difference according to the design principles of the original nuclear suppliers and their technical standards to be imposed. This is due to the uncertainties of the accidental source term, radionuclide behavior in the environment, and subsequent radiological dose. Both types of PWR and PHWR are operated in Korea. However, technical standards for evaluating atmospheric dispersion have been enacted based on the U.S. NRC's positions regardless of the reactor types. For this reason, it might cause a controversy between the licensor and licensee of a nuclear power plant. Materials and Methods: It was modelled under the framework of the NRC Regulatory Guide 1.145 for light-water reactors, reflecting the features of heavy-water reactors as specified in the Canadian National Standard and the modelling features in MACCS2, such as atmospheric diffusion coefficient, ground deposition, surface roughness, radioactive plume depletion, and exposure from ground deposition. Results and Discussion: An integrated accident consequence assessment code, ACCESS (Accident Consequence Assessment Code for Evaluating Site Suitability), was developed by taking into account the unique regulatory positions for reactor types under the framework of the current Korean technical standards. Field tracer experiments and hand calculations have been carried out for validation and verification of the models. Conclusion: The modelling approaches of ACCESS and its features are introduced, and its applicative results for a hypothetical accidental scenario are comprehensively discussed. In an applicative study, the predicted results by the light-water reactor assessment model were higher than those by other models in terms of total doses.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.97-106
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• 1970

Radiation accidents which occured in the A.E.R.I. during last ten years are described (table 1). It seemed to the authors that some of these accidents were considered to be hazardous to man body and associated installations. This report deals with the following four major accidents involving body contamination incidents that our health physicists have been experienced. 1. Over-exposures (up to 130 rem) to the total body due to the mismanipulation in the Cobalt-60 gamma irradiation facility. 2. Floor surface contamination (up to 13 mrad/hr) and its spread out due to the mishandling of radioiodine contained in the bottle. 3. Body surface contamination and 0.36 uCi radioactivity accumulated in the thyroid gland of a worker due to the inhalation of gaseous iodine-131. 4. A void capsule due to the leakage out of the radium therapeutic source (3mg\ulcorner) These accidents were treated by definitely prompt action to protect the workers and associated installations from any radiation hazards and every possible efforts were made to confine the spread of radioactive contamination as small area as possible by means of elaborate decontamination work and monitoring.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.10
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• pp.2361-2369
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• 2020

Compton cameras using large scintillators have been developed for high imaging sensitivity. These scintillator-based Compton cameras, however, mainly due to relatively low energy resolution, suffer from undesired background-radiation signals, especially when radioactive materials' activity is very low or their location is far from the Compton camera. To alleviate this problem for a large-size Compton camera, in the present study, a hybrid-type shielding system was designed that combines an active shield with a veto detector and a passive shield that surrounds the active shield. Then, the performance of the hybrid shielding system was predicted, by Monte Carlo radiation transport simulation using Geant4, in terms of minimum detectable activity (MDA), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and image resolution. Our simulation results show that, for the most cases, the hybrid shielding system significantly improves the performance of the large-size Compton camera. For the cases investigated in the present study, the use of the shielding system decreased the MDA by about 1.4, 1.6, and 1.3 times, increased the SNR by 1.2-1.9, 1.1-1.7, and 1.3-2.1 times, and improved the image resolution (i.e., reduced the FWHM) by 7-8, 1-6, and 3-5% for ¹³⁷Cs, ⁶⁰Co, and ¹³¹I point source located at 1-5 m from the imaging system, respectively.

• Tunnel and Underground Space
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.349-358
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• 2011

This paper introduces a new P wave arrival time determination algorithm of acoustic emission (AE) suitable to identify P waves with low signal-to-noise ratio generated in rock masses around the high-level radioactive waste disposal repositories. The algorithms adopted for this paper were amplitude threshold picker, Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), two step AIC, and Hinkley criterion. The elastic waves were generated by Pencil Lead Break test on a granite sample, then mixed with white noise to make it difficult to distinguish P wave artificially. The results obtained from amplitude threshold picker, AIC, and Hinkley criterion produced relatively large error due to the low signal-to-noise ratio. On the other hand, two step AIC algorithm provided the correct results regardless of white noise so that the accuracy of source localization was more improved and could be satisfied with the error range.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.37 no.12
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• pp.1567-1572
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• 2013

To supply electric power in certain extreme environments such as a spacecraft or in military applications, a radioisotope thermoelectric generator has been highlighted as a useful energy source owing to its high energy density, long lifetime, and high reliability. A radioisotope thermoelectric generator generates electric power by using the heat energy converted from the radioactive energy of a radioisotope. In this study, FE analyses such as radiation shield analysis, heat transfer analysis, and power recovery rate analysis have been carried out to achieve an optimal design for a radioisotope thermoelectric generator using $SrTiO_2$.

• Journal of Korean Society on Water Environment
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.579-590
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• 2018

The lakes' metabolism bears important information for the assessment of the carbon budget due to the accumulation or loss of carbon in the lake as well as the dynamics of the food webs through primary production. A lake-scale metabolism is evaluated by Gross Primary Production (GPP), Ecosystem Respiration (R), and Net Ecosystem Production (NEP), which is the difference between the first two values. Methods for estimating GPP and R are based on the levels carbon and oxygen. Estimation of carbon is expensive because of the use of radioactive materials which requires a high degree of proficiency. The purpose of this study was to estimate Lake Daecheong ecosystem metabolism using high frequency water temperature data and DO measurement sensor, widely utilized in the field of water quality monitoring, and to evaluate the possibility of using the application method. High frequency data was collected at intervals of 10 minutes from September to December 2017 by installing a thermistor chain and a DO sensor in downstream of Daechung Dam. The data was then used to estimate GPP, R and NEP using the R public program LakeMetabolizer, and other metabolism models (mle, ols, kalman, bookkeep). Calculations of gas exchange coefficient methods (cole, crusius, heiskanen, macIntyre, read, soloviev, vachon) were compared. According to the result, Lake Daecheong has some deviation based on the application method, but it was generally estimated that the NEP value is negative and acts as a source of atmospheric carbon in a heterotrophic system. Although the high frequency sensor data used in this study had negative and positive GPP and R values during the physical mixing process, they can be used to monitor real-time metabolic changes in the ecosystem if these problems are solved.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.3
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• pp.1037-1048
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• 2022

A radioactive isotope identification algorithm is a prerequisite for a low-resolution scintillation detector applied to an unmanned radiation monitoring system. In this paper, a sparse representation with dictionary learning approach is proposed and applied to plastic gamma-ray spectra. Label-consistent K-SVD was used to learn a discriminative dictionary for the spectra corresponding to a mixture of four isotopes (¹³³Ba, ²²Na, ¹³⁷Cs, and ⁶⁰Co). A Monte Carlo simulation was employed to produce the simulated data as learning samples. Experimental measurement was conducted to obtain practical spectra. After determining the hyper parameters, two dictionaries tailored to the learning samples were tested by varying with the source position and the measurement time. They achieved average accuracies of 97.6% and 98.0% for all testing spectra. The average accuracy of each dictionary was above 96% for spectra measured over 2 s. They also showed acceptable performance when the spectra were artificially shifted. Thus, the proposed method could be useful for identifying radioisotopes in gamma-ray spectra from a plastic scintillation detector even when a dictionary is adapted to only simulated data. Furthermore, owing to the outstanding properties of sparse representation, the proposed approach can easily be built into an insitu monitoring system.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.22-27
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• 2022

In accordance with the growing trend of decommissioning nuclear facilities, research on the cutting process is actively proceeding worldwide. In general, a thermal cutting process, such as plasma cutting is applied to decommissioning a nuclear reactor pressure vessel (RPV). Plasma cutting has the advantage of removing the radioactive materials and being able to cut thick materials. However, when operating under water, the molten metal remains in the cut plane and re-solidifies. Hence, cutting is not entirely accomplished. For these environmental reasons, it is difficult to cut thick metal. The contact arc metal cutting (CAMC) process can be used to cut thick metal under water. CAMC is a process that cuts metal using a plate-shaped electrode based on a high-current arc plasma heat source. During the cutting process, high-pressure water is sprayed from the electrode to remove the molten metal, known as rinsing. As the CAMC is conducted without using a shielding gas, such as Argon, the electrode is consumed during the process. In this study, CAMC is introduced as a method for dismantling nuclear vessels and the relationship between the metal removal and electrode consumption is investigated according to the cutting conditions.