Radiation monitoring by minicomputer

Radiation monitoring at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) ranges from measuring the potential build-up of alpha particle radiation in the offices and laboratories of LASL to the detection of radiation leakage from nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site (NTS). This paper describes PDP-11 based systems to accomplish both types of monitoring. In the first system, filter papers are collected from monitoring stations around LASL. One filter paper is placed under any of 128 photomultiplier (PM) tubes exposing it to alpha radiation. Alpha particle ''hits'' are recorded in a 64-word hardware FIFO, which interrupts and is read by the computer. The FIFO makes it possible to handle short aggregate alpha particle bursts of up to 106 hits/s in a computer that can only process 104 hits/s. In the second system, up to 100 current measuring radiation probes feed data from the site of the nuclear test(s) to the computer by microwave. The software system can support three tests simultaneously. Both systems offer a high degree of flexibility in configuring for a new test and in real-time control of such things as channel assignment, selective data retrieval, and output formatting