I am looking forward to seeing many of you again in the special session of the Accelerator Section at the Health Physics Society (HPS) annual meeting. It is scheduled to begin Tuesday morning at 8:15 AM, starting with the G. William Morgan Lecture presented by Alberto Fasso, my distinguished colleague from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Alberto’s lecture will be on "Accelerator Shielding Design: From Protons to Electrons, from America to Europe and Back." His talk is followed by a presentation by DeVaughn Nelson on "Updating the Department of Energy Accelerator Safety Order and Guide."
Our president-elect, Lorraine Day, has done a wonderful job in organizing this year’s session. I hope that many of you will be present for the special session. You can check the entire agenda on the HPS website. Please don’t forget the annual business meeting of our section. We will meet at the end of the Tuesday morning session at approximately 11:45 AM.
A year has come and gone so quickly; I appreciate having had the opportunity to serve as the section’s president for the last year. The report of the section’s activities is attached. My thanks to each and every one of you, with special thanks to Lorraine Day, our past president Bob Casey, the treasurer Marcia Torres, and of course Linnea Wahl, who has greatly enhanced the communication among the section’s membership.
Date: June 16, 2005
Prepared by Sayed Rokni, President
Contributions from
Abstract: This report summarizes the activities of the Health Physics Society (HPS) Accelerator Section for the 2004-2005 business year.
The Accelerator Board would like the HPS Board of Directors to consider the following item.
Thank you for the board’s consideration of this item.
The Accelerator Section of the HPS held its annual business meeting during the 2004 Annual Meeting of the HPS in Washington, D.C. At this meeting, newly elected officers were announced, and they immediately assumed their respective positions. The officers of the section for 2004-05 are as follows.
As of April 30, 2005, the section account is as follows.
Accelerator Section of the Health Physics Society
Statement of Income and Expenses and Account Balance For The 8-Month Period Ending April 30, 2005
ACCOUNT BALANCE 8/31/04: 6757.39
INCOME RECEIVED
EXPENSES PAID
NET INCREASE FOR YEAR: 589.50
ACCOUNT BALANCE 4/30/05: 7346.89
ACCOUNT BALANCE 8/31/03: 6462.39
INCOME RECEIVED
This represents a net increase of approximately $300 from the 2004 levels ($7020.39) despite the awarding of $300 for the H. Wade Patterson Memorial Award together with an $80 plaque to the outstanding student accelerator-related paper.
For the past several years, the Accelerator Section has organized a special session at the annual meeting. This session is devoted to accelerator radiation protection and has once again been arranged for the 50th annual meeting in Spokane. The section would like to recognize the continuing support of the Morgan Lecturer Fund in helping to organize the session, which is spearheaded by a one-hour lecture from an internationally recognized individual specializing in accelerator-related health physics. The section is pleased to note that Alberto Fasso, the codeveloper of the cutting-edge Monte Carlo computer code, FLUKA, will give the keynote address for the special accelerator session. The section's president-elect, Lorraine Day, submitted Mr. Fasso’s name for consideration by the President’s Emeritus Committee, which annually selects the Morgan lecturers, and coordinated the scientific program. A full program of ten presentations is scheduled. A copy of the titles is provided below for your perusal.
Accelerator Section Session (TAM-B)
8:15 AM TAM-B.1: "Accelerator Shielding Design: From Protons to Electrons, from America to Europe and Back," A. Fasso, Morgan Lecture (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center); presented by Alberto Fasso
9:00 AM TAM-B.2: "Updating the Department of Energy Accelerator Safety Order and Guide," D.R. Nelson (US Department of Energy [DOE], Office of Science) and D.C. Parzyck (US DOE, Fermilab Site Office); presented by DeVaughn Nelson
9:15 AM TAM-B.3: "Comparison of Shielding Design and Operational Radiation Safety Issues for Synchrotron Radiation Facilities," J.C. Liu (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), S.H. Rokni (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), Y. Asano (Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, Japan), W.R. Casey (Brookhaven National Laboratory), R.J. Donahue (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), and P.K. Job (Argonne National Laboratory); presented by Sayed H. Rokni
9:30 AM TAM-B.4: "Shielding Cask for a Cf-252 Ion Source," S.I. Baker, E.F. Moore, R.C. Pardo, and G. Savard (Argonne National Laboratory); presented by Sam Baker
9:45 AM TAM-B.5: "NuMI Work-Cell Shielding Design," K.V. Vaziri (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory); presented by Kamran Vaziri
10:00 AM TAM-B.6: "High-Energy Neutron Spectral Unfolding Using Activation Foils," L.S. Walker (Los Alamos National Laboratory), R.H. Olsher (Los Alamos National Laboratory), J. Oostens (Campbellsville University, Kentucky), and M. James (Los Alamos National Laboratory); presented by L. Scott Walker
10:45 AM TAM-B.7: "Angular Distribution of X-Ray Differential Flux, Ambient and Effective Dose Intensity from 1 to 20 MeV Electron Accelerators," M.S. Singh and K.L. Shingleton (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory); presented by Mike Singh
11:00 AM TAM-B.8: "A Safety Analysis of a Reconfigurable Linac Target," P.F. Caracappa and R.C. Block (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute); presented by Peter Caracappa
11:15 AM TAM-B.9: "Cabinet-Safe Challenges for Portable Accelerator Operation," J.K. Billa, D.P. Wells, and J.F. Harmon (Idaho State University); presented by Jermiah Billa
11:30 AM TAM-B.10: "Radiation Dosimeter System for a 20-MeV Pulsed Linear Accelerator Beam at High Dose Rates for Radiobiological Applications," M.A. Mestari; J. Case; T. Webb; L.C. DeVeaux; and D.P. Wells (Idaho State University); presented by Mohammed Mestari
The Accelerator Section’s nomination of Alberto Fasso for the G. William Morgan Lecturer Award at the annual meeting was approved by the HPS Presidents Emeritus Committee. The section is very appreciative of this lecturer award and the ability it creates to recognize outstanding health physicists like Mr. Fasso. Mr. Fasso is currently associated with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory, but spent nearly 25 years at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland.
In addition, the section nominated Nolan Hertel as an HPS Fellow and Scott Schwann for consideration for the Elda D. Anderson Award. Both candidates have been important contributors to accelerator radiation protection and we welcome and are appreciative of this opportunity to recognize our members in this manner.
As a tribute to the first section president and the father of accelerator health physics, the H. Wade Patterson Award was established and approved by the board three years ago. Further, this award represents the section’s best attempt to encourage students to pursue careers in the unique health physics environment of accelerators. This is the third year that the H. Wade Patterson Memorial Award for the best student accelerator paper/poster will be presented at the annual meeting. It is awarded at the Accelerator Section business meeting. The Patterson Award winner will receive a $300 cash prize and a plaque. The award was announced in the HPS newsletter and also distributed to the HPS student chapter advisors. Disappointingly, to this point no applications have been received. The officers of the board will continue to discuss at the annual meeting how we should proceed with this matter.
Newsletter contributors included accelerator radiation safety professionals from US DOE laboratories, universities, and international accelerator facilities. The newsletters included special articles on regulations, recommendations, and other issues of interest to accelerator health physicists. The officers of the Accelerator Section Board of Directors submitted articles on section activities such as elections, technical sessions planning, and awards. This newsletter is distributed worldwide, not just to the HPS community. We hope that it fosters international communications between like-minded individuals. The section is especially appreciative of the continuing efforts of our newsletter editor, Linnea Wahl. Her continued devotion is remarkable and deserves special mention. The section intends to award her a certificate of appreciation at its annual business meeting in Spokane.
In 2004-2005, we issued four quarterly volumes of the Accelerator Radiation Safety Newsletter. We distributed the newsletter via e-mail to all members of the Accelerator Section and to others interested in accelerator safety. We also posted each issue of the newsletter on a website at http://www.hps.org/iarpe. The content of the four newsletters included reports from officers of the Accelerator Section and news from correspondents at accelerator facilities around the world. Featured articles included papers by Dr. Ralph Thomas discussing the implications International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) Report 92 for accelerator health physicists and a preview of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) N43.1 standard on accelerator radiation safety. In addition, the newsletter published the abstract of the G. William Morgan Lecture presented by Dr. Graham Stevenson, our distinguished colleague from CERN, and announced the award of the H. Wade Patterson Memorial Award to Vakhtang Makarishvili for best paper on an accelerator-related topic. The newsletter also served as a medium for announcing job openings and training opportunities.
Feedback on the newsletter was sparse but positive. There were few changes in the circulation numbers from one quarter to the next, which suggests that readers were relatively satisfied. The newsletter is reaching an international audience, as was made clear when the Dutch Radiation Protection Society ("NVS Nieuws") requested permission to reprint Ralph Thomas's summary of his 2003 G. William Morgan Lecture.
An ad hoc Accelerator Section committee appointed at last year’s board meeting made comments to the ICRP regarding their draft set of radiation protection recommendations (ICRP Report 92). Bob Casey, Don Cossairt, Alberto Fasso, Nolan Hertel, and Sayed Rokni were members of the committee, but the efforts of Alberto Fasso were particularly critical in the development of the comments offered by the committee.
The ad hoc committee’s comments focused on the quantities for radiological protection defined in Chapter 3 of the ICRP draft report. In particular, the committee noted that the decision to define the quantity "effective dose" has several drawbacks.
The ad hoc committee noted that the current approach to radiation protection practice used at high-energy accelerators is widely based on fluence-to-dose conversion coefficients.
The ANSI N43.1 Committee on Accelerator Radiological Safety Standards has made steady progress last year in meeting with the ANSI N43 committee at their March 29 meeting in Washington, D.C. Plans are to submit the final draft to the ANSI N43 committee for approval in before the end of 2005.
Accelerator Section officers and members (Gary Zeman, Bob Casey, Kamran Vaziri, Scott Walker, Don Cossairt, and Sayed Rokni) participated in the efforts to update the implementation guide for the U.S. DOE Order 420.2B, "Safety of Accelerator Facilities." Many thanks to DeVaughn Nelson, DOE Office of Science, who invited the accelerator community to work with the DOE in this effort. The updated document will shortly become a formal DOE guide in the DOE directives system.
The Accelerator Section Board of Directors is engaged in preliminary planning with the Northern California Chapter of the HPS to hold a 2008 midyear meeting on radiation-generating machines in the San Francisco Bay area. The section would undertake the responsibility of preparing the technical program and the chapter would coordinate their efforts with the local arrangements committee. A proposal will be presented to the HPS Venues Committee at the Spokane annual HPS meeting.
The ballot for new officers and board members was distributed by Past President Bob Casey on June 4. The positions and their candidates were president-elect, Scott Walker; secretary, Marcia Torres; newsletter editor, Linnea Wahl; and two board members, Mike Sandvig and Henry Tran. Ballots were distributed by e-mail to all section members. The announcement of new officers will be made at the Accelerator Section business meeting at 11:45 AM, Tuesday, July 12, at the annual meeting in Spokane, WA.