Personal dosimetry at the Paul Scherrer Institute

Abstract

The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is the largest research institute for natural and engineering sciences in Switzerland. PSI develops, builds and operates complex large research facilities. Every year, >2400 scientists from Switzerland and around the world come to PSI to use the facilities and to carry out experiments. Many areas at PSI are radiation protection areas. Depending on the radiation protection area, the work carried out and the time the users spend in these areas, they have to carry a personal dosemeter. PSI runs an individual monitoring service in compliance with the Swiss legislation on radiological protection and approved by the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate. The service provides about 35 000 dosemeters per year for the internal and external customers consisting of whole-body dosemeters for photons and neutrons as well as extremity dosemeters. This paper gives an overview on the employed personal dosimetry techniques by the individual monitoring service of PSI, the number of distributed dosemeters for internal and external customers and statistics about the measured doses at PSI over 30 years.