Skin dose evaluations using exoelectron dosemeters

In the United States, the potential exists for workers at commercial nuclear facilities and US Department of Energy (DOE) facilities to be contaminated by beta emitting radionuclides. In addition, a common occurrence at many commercial reactor facilities is ''hot-particle'' skin contaminations, which result in highly localised skin doses. Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) has performed dose assessments of non-uniform beta fields at DOE sites and of hot particles from commercial reactors. The non-uniform fields have been generated by high energy beta sources, whereas the hot particles have included both activated stellite particles, which emit low energy beta particles, and fuel particles, which emit both low and high energy beta particles. Exoelectron dosemeters have proved to be accurate for these measurements. The results of these evaluations and a comparison with both calculations and measurements using extrapolation chambers will be presented. (author)