Contamination and self-remediation of an armoured vehicle
Publish date: 2019-05-16
Report number: FOI-R--4779--SE
Pages: 27
Written in: Swedish
Keywords:
- Decontamination
- radiation dose
- study of contamination
Abstract
When a vehicle is driven in a radioactively contaminated area it might be necessary to decontaminate the vehicle in order to reduce subsequent radiation dose to transported personnel, or e.g. to service engineers. Previous studies have shown that an alternative to active decontamination is to selfremediate by driving in a clean area. However, these studies were all carried out in humid weather conditions. Therefore, the conditions for the experiment were chosen to be dry in the study performed in 2018. A vehicle that was driven in the contaminated area was repeatedly measured with regards to dose rate and activity at given distances. The same measurements were done afterwards in order to observe the possible self-remediation of driving in a clean area. The vehicle used in this study was an armoured troop transport vehicle and the contaminated area had a surface of gravel, to simulate a country road, contaminated with the radioactive isotope 24Na. The results of the study show that the effect of self-remediation is difficult to quantify under dry conditions. At the same time, the results show that a relatively low amount of activity is transported onto the vehicle, which means that the dose rate from the outside of the vehicle will be low after traveling in the contaminated area. When extrapolating the results from this work to an assumed on-the-ground fallout as a result of a nuclear weapons detonation, the outside dose levels from the vehicle itself would not have any significant impact on e.g. service engineers. Similarly, the dominant radiation dose contributor inside the vehicle would be that of the radioactivity on the ground.