Study of Radiation Shielding Protective Clothing's (RSPCs) for maintenance of mobile nuclear power plants

Most radiation exposure in Occupationally Exposed Individuals (OEIs) at a nuclear power plant comes from inspection, maintenance and repair within the reactor compartment. The objective of this paper was to discover the garment that, at the same time, presents the best result of ionizing radiation attenuation, as well as good ergonomics for the maintenance professional of mobile nuclear plants. For this, market research was carried out and, as a result, nine personal Radiation Shielding Protective Clothing's (RSPCs) were found, from five different manufacturers and from three countries, the United States, Japan and China; and which are feasible to be acquired. To choose the RSPC, the optimization techniques of ICRP 55 were used: Multi-Attribute Utility Analysis and Multi-Criteria Outranking Analysis. Based on the information provided by the manufacturers, five attributes were chosen for comparison: protection cost, percentage of ionizing radiation attenuation, weight, comfort and surface decontamination of the protective garment. To verify the robustness of the analytical solution, the values of the scaling constants were re-calculated, where it was observed that the analytical solution found is strongly influenced when the protection cost is changed, as it is the highest cost RSPC among all those surveyed. The RSPC chosen by both optimization techniques was the STEMRAD 360γ, which has the highest ionizing radiation attenuation, as well as being the garment with greater emphasis on ergonomics. Finally, from the garment identified as the best protective equipment, tests were proposed to verify the attenuation capacity of ionizing radiation, as well as the initial steps for the development and manufacture of a National Radiation Shielding Protective Clothing (NRSPC) for application in maintenance of mobile nuclear power plants. (author)