Reevaluation of photon activation yields of ¹¹C. ¹³N, and ¹⁵O for the estimation of activity in gas and water induced by the operation of electron accelerates for medical use

Activation of air and water in the electron linear accelerator for medical use has not been considered severely. By the new Japanese regulation for protection of radiation hazard, it became indispensable to evaluate of activation of air and water in the accelerator room. The measurement of induced activity in air and water components in the electron energy region of 10 to 20 MeV is very difficult, because this energy region is close to the threshold energy region of photonuclear reactions. Then, we measured the photonuclear reaction yields of ¹³N,¹⁵O, and ¹¹C by using the electron linear accelerator. Obtained data were compared with the data calculated by the Monte Carlo method. An activation experiment was performed at the Research Center for Electron Photon Science, Tohoku University. Highly purified SiO₂, Si₃N₄, and carbon disks were irradiated for 10 minutes by Bremsstrahlung converted by a tungsten plate. Induced activity from C, N, and O was obtained. Monte Carlo calculation was performed using MCNP5 and AERY (DCHAIN-SP) to simulate the experimental condition. Cross section data were adopted the KAERI dataset. In our experiment in hospital, calculated values were not agreed with experimental values. It might be three possible reasons as the cause of this deference, such as irradiation energy, calculation procedure and cross section data. Obtained data of this work, calculated and experimental values were good agreement with each other within one order. In this work, we used KAERI dataset of photonuclear reaction instead of JENDL. Therefore, it was found that the photonuclear cross section data of light elements are most important for yield calculation in these reactions. Further improvement for calculation using a new dataset JENDL/PD-2015 and considering electron energy spreading will be needed