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Description
The medical cyclotrons intended to produce medical isotopes are relatively widespread. Nowadays, it is popular to place small and compact accelerators directly to hospitals. This approach simplifies handling with produced radiopharmaceuticals, but it imposes radiation safety measures during production. Radiation protection issues are gaining on importance especially as production increases on current cyclotrons which leads to higher radiation loads than originally designed. For optimal utilization of isotope production cyclotron, the exact knowledge of leakage neutron field is essential due to the deep penetration ability of the high energy neutrons and accompanied secondary radiation production. Our paper presents measurement of neutron leakage spectra in various angles from open target assembly located in research laboratory of Czech academy of sciences. These spectra are compared with data obtained from compact medical cyclotron IBA Cyclone 18/9 accelerator in the UJV Rez cyclotron laboratory. The neutron spectra were measured by the organic scintillator coupled with fast two-parameter spectrometric system NGA-01 equipped with an active voltage divider. The spectra measurement was accompanied by reaction rates measurement of reactions with various threshold for validation of the shape of neutron spectra. The preliminary results show significant disagreement between experiments and theoretical predictions in both cases, open target assembly and production cyclotron IBA 18/9. These findings could have implications not only to the nuclear data community but also to the production accelerators’ operators at the licensing stage.