Development of position sensitive proportional counters for hot particle detection in laundry and portal monitors

This report summarizes research which demonstrates the use of position sensitive proportional counters in contamination monitoring systems. Both laundry monitoring and portal monitoring systems were developed. The laundry monitor was deployed at a nuclear power plant where it was used to monitor clothing during an outage. Position sensitive proportional counter based contamination monitoring systems were shown to have significant advantages over systems using conventional proportional counters. These advantages include the ability to directly measure the area and quantity of contamination. This capability permits identification of hot particles. These systems are also capable of self calibration via internal check sources. Systems deployed with this technology should benefit from reduced complexity, cost and maintenance. The inherent reduction of background that occurs when the counter is electronically divided into numerous detectors permits operation in high background radiation fields and improves detection limits over conventional technology