Radiation protection issues related to Canadian museum operations.

Museums in Canada have been found to possess radioactive items. The origin of the radiation can be broadly categorized as either natural (generally, radioactive ores) or anthropogenic (generally, luminous gauges). Radioluminescent gauges, especially bearing radium (226Ra), can also generate significant radiation fields.

Release limits and decontamination efficacy for tritium: lessons learned outside nuclear power operations.

Various pieces of equipment in use by the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) contain radiation-emitting components. One such piece is a sight knob used on light artillery. At the request of the DND's Director General Nuclear Safety (DGNS-DND's internal nuclear regulatory agency), the authors were contacted to remove the luminous tritium-impregnated paint strip from over 300 sight knobs.

Techniques for radiation measurements: microdosimetry and dosimetry.

Experimental microdosimetry is concerned with the determination of radiation quality and how this can be specified in terms of the distribution of energy deposition arising from the interaction of a radiation field with a particular target site. This paper discusses various techniques that have been developed to measure radiation energy deposition over the three orders of magnitude of site-size; nanometer, micrometer and millimetre, which radiation biology suggests is required to fully account for radiation quality. Inevitably, much of the discussion will concern the use of tissue-equivalent proportional counters and variants of this device, but other technologies that have been studied, or are under development, for their potential in experimental microdosimetry are also covered.