Regular Article

Ambient dose simulation of the ProtherWal proton therapy centre radioactive shielding decay using BDSIM and FISPACT-II

¹ Service de Métrologie Nucléaire, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium
² CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, 1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
³ Ion Beam Applications (IBA), Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

^* e-mail: eliott.ramoisiaux@ulb.be

Received: 17 April 2023
Received in final form: 13 June 2023
Accepted: 26 July 2023
Published online: 5 September 2023

Abstract

Next-generation proton therapy centres couple treatment and research programs, leading to higher beam currents and longer irradiation times than in clinical conditions. Large fluxes of energetic secondary particles are produced and long- and short-term radioactive nuclides are generated in the concrete shielding of the cyclotron vault. While the overall long-term activation of the centre is well known from the shielding design activation studies, the short-term activation peaks are still of importance when radiation protection studies are involved. The centre shielding design was validated using the BDSIM/FISPACT-II methodology combining particle tracking and Monte Carlo particle-matter interactions simulations using Beam Delivery Simulation (BDSIM) and the computation of the activation using FISPACT-II. We establish, as the next stage of our methodology, the simulation of the decay radiation of the activated concrete shielding and the accurate scoring of the related radiation protection quantities. A single BDSIM simulation per radioactive nuclide is performed based on the nuclide concentration obtained from the prior FISPACT-II activation computations at the start of a given cooling period. The evolution of the radiation protection quantities is obtained by scaling the results with the nuclides activity obtained at later times from fast FISPACT-II computations. We show the evolution of the ambient dose equivalent in the centre vault when considering regular concrete and Low Activation Concrete (LAC) as shielding material to demonstrate the efficiency of LAC mix in mitigating the shielding activation.