Application of multipoint dose rate measurement for radioactive inventory estimation in waste drums

Dose-to-Curie (DTC) conversion is a fast and simple method for quantification of radionuclide content in solid waste packages with a prior knowledge of waste matrix and radionuclide composition of the waste stream. A dose to curie conversion factor generated based on an assumed radioactivity distribution in the package is used for conversion of the measured dose rate to activity. The difference between the radionuclide distribution for drum from field and the assumed distribution is a major source of error in activity estimation using this technique. In this work, the systematic error of DTC method, due to the spatial variation of a single hot-spot in 200 L solid waste drum is subjected to systematic analysis using Monte-Carlo simulation. Data analysis was carried out with 1920 source locations within the drum and up to sixteen measurement points for dose rates around the drum. The span of error obtained for different configurations of detectors were compared to optimise the waste drum assay system. The general trends observed in simulation were found to be in good agreement with the experimental measurements done using a 137Cs (318.2 MBq) standard source placed at selected locations. The results presented here clearly establish the advantage of multipoint dose rate measurement to improve the accuracy in activity estimation using DTC method. •Multi-point (up to 16) dose rate measurements around a waste drum were studied to optimise the estimate of its radioactive waste inventory using the Dose-to-Curie (DTC) conversion method.•The angular variation of source position inside the drum was found to be critical to the amount of error in activity estimation.•An arrangement with six measurements, two axial and three angular, was found to produce activity estimation with an acceptable error (