Two dimensional imaging of radiation accidents and radioactive contamination

Abstract An accident in a nuclear power plant caused by an unpredictable event such as an explosion, fire and earthquake is so serious that we have to carefully and precisely detect any radiation leakage from the plants, given that the number of nuclear power plants is recently increasing in order to cope with the contamination of air due to carbon dioxide emission from conventional power plants. Invisible radiation contamination of the environment due to nuclear fallout in nuclear power plants and research laboratories is also a very serious problem necessitating an urgent solution. For this purpose, bundles composed of well-designed and regularly arranged scintillation fiber segments or thin cylinders have been developed to detect and display the radiation sources as a map, using the directional sensitivity of the segments or cylinders for locating sources of incident radiation. By combining several types of scintillating elements into a bundle, we have developed a “panchromatic” detector that is suitable for use against radiation from different types of sources.