Improving measurement quality assurance for photon irradiations at Department of Energy facilities. Final technical report

For radiation-instrument calibration to be generally acceptable throughout the US, direct or indirect traceability to a primary standard is required. In most instances, one of the primary standards established at NIST is employed for this purpose. The Department of Energy Laboratory Accreditation Program (DOELAP) is an example of a program employing dosimetry based on the NIST primary photon-, beta particle- and neutron-dosimetry standards. The NIST primary dosimetry standards for bremsstrahlung were first established in the 1950s. They have been updated since then on several occasions. In the 1970s, Technical Committee 85 of the International Standards Organization (ISO) started its work on establishing sets of internationally acceptable, well-characterized photon beams for the calibration of radiation-protection instruments. It is the intent of this paper to make a detailed comparison between the current NIST and the most up-to-date ISO techniques. At present, 41 bremsstrahlung techniques are specified in ISO 4037 while NIST supports a total of 32 techniques. Given the existing equivalences, it makes sense to try to extend the NIST techniques to cover more of the ISO Narrow Spectrum and High Air-Kerma Rate Series. These extensions will also allow the possibility for use of ISO beam techniques in future revisions of the DOELAP standard, which has been suggested by DOE. To this end, NIST was funded by DOE to procure material and make adaptations to the existing NIST x-ray calibration ranges to allow NIST to have the capability of producing all the ISO bremsstrahlung techniques. The following sections describe the steps that were taken to achieve this