Radiation Shielding

Radiation protection, sometimes known as radiological protection, is the science of protecting people and the environment from the harmful effects of ionizing radiation, which includes bothparticle radiation and high energy electromagnetic radiation.

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Ionizing radiation is widely used in industry and medicine, but presents a significant health hazard. It causes microscopic damage to living tissue, resulting in skin burns and at high exposures and statistically elevated risks of disesesat low exposures.

Radiation protection can be divided into occupational radiation protection, which is the protection of workers; medical radiation protection, which is the protection of patients; and public radiation protection, which is protection of individual members of the public, and of the population as a whole. The types of exposure, as well as government regulations and legal exposure limits are different for each of these groups, so they must be considered separately.

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Radiation Shielding


There are three factors that control the amount, or dose, of radiation received from a source. Radiation exposure can be managed by a combination of these factors:

1.    Time: Reducing the time of an exposure reduces the effective dose proportionally. An example of reducing radiation doses by reducing the time of exposures might be improving operator training to reduce the time they take to handle a source.

2.    Distance: Increasing distance reduces dose due to the inverse square law. Distance can be as simple as handling a source with forceps rather than fingers.

3.    Shielding: The term 'biological shield' refers to a mass of absorbing material placed around a reactor, or other radioactive source, to reduce the radiation to a level safe for humans.[1] The effectiveness of a material as a biological shield is related to its cross-section for scattering and absorption, and to a first approximation is proportional to the total mass of material per unit area interposed along the line of sight between the radiation source and the region to be protected. Hence, shielding strength or "thickness" is conventionally measured in units of g/cm2. The radiation that manages to get through falls exponentially with the thickness of the shield. In x-ray facilities, the plaster on the rooms with the x-ray generator contains barium sulfate and the operators stay behind a leaded glass screen and wear lead aprons. Almost any material can act as a shield from gamma or x-rays if used in sufficient amounts.