Use of virtual reality to estimate radiation dose rates in nuclear plants

Operators in nuclear plants receive radiation doses during several different operation procedures. A training program capable of simulating these operation scenarios will be useful in several ways, helping the planning of operational procedures so as to reduce the doses received by workers, and to minimize operations' times. It can provide safe virtual operation training, visualization of radiation dose rates, and estimation of doses received by workers. Thus, a virtual reality application, a free game engine, has been adapted to achieve the goals of this project. Simulation results for Argonauta research reactor of Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear are shown in this paper. A database of dose rate measurements, previously performed by the radiological protection service, has been used to display the dose rate distribution in the region of interest. The application enables the user to walk in the virtual scenario, displaying at all times the dose accumulated by the avatar. (author)