14 DAY TRIAL // Thanks to a new technology invented by members of the Engineering Faculty at Oregon State University, cleaning up nuclear contaminated sites will be more accurate, less expensive and much faster to complete.
This new type of radiation detection and measurement spectrometer has been granted a patent, and the first devices will soon be manufactured.
David Hamby, an OSU professor of health physics, and Abi Farsoni, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering took ten years to develop this spectrometer.
It can rapidly tell the type and amount of radionuclides that were produced from reactor operations, present in a soil sample – contaminants such as cesium 137 or strontium 90, and it can also make the difference between gamma rays and beta particles – necessary to determine the level of contamination.
“Cleaning up radioactive contamination is something we can do, but the process is costly, and often the question when working in the field is how clean is clean enough,” said Hamby.
“At some point the remaining level of radioactivity is not a concern.
“So we need the ability to do frequent and accurate testing to protect the environment while also controlling costs.”
According to Hamby, this should be possible, and the spectrometer could even be used in the nuclear energy industry – in monitoring processes, or maybe it could have medical applications in the use of radioactive tracers.
This invention determined the creation of Avicenna Instruments, a Corvallis-based spinoff company that's relying on the OSU research.
The researchers say that this type of instruments could be used at a global scale, which means that thousands of them could be built.
In the US today, unimaginable amounts of money are spent on cleaning up some major sites contaminated by radioactivity – like the Hanford site in Washington, Savannah River site in South Carolina, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, mainly from the historic production of nuclear weapons during and after the Second World War.
Hamby said that “unlike other detectors, this spectrometer is more efficient, and able to measure and quantify both gamma and beta radiation at the same time.
“Before this two different types of detectors and other chemical tests were needed in a time-consuming process.
“This system will be able to provide accurate results in 15 minutes that previously might have taken half a day.
“That saves steps, time and money,” added Hamby.
The Oregon State University College of Engineering has signed the first contract with Ludlum Instruments, a Sweetwater, Texas, manufacturer that will produce the first instruments.
Meanwhile, the OSU Office of Technology Transfer is seeking a licensee for commercial development, and the electronic systems for the spectrometers will be produced in Oregon by Avicenna Instruments.