A new algorithm for radioisotope concentration monitoring in cooling water outlet of nuclear power plant

In the nuclear power plant (NPP), cooling water is continuously sampled through a small pipe at the outlet before flowing back to the ocean for the purpose of radioactivity concentration monitoring in water. We propose a new algorithm to identify the artificial radioisotopes probably produced in the NPP and released into the cooling water which can be added to the existing water monitoring unit without any hardware cost but by inserting a simple algorithm. The key component of the algorithm is a conversion matrix which changes the measured pulse height spectrum into the energy spectrum of gamma sources in water tank at a given period of time. This is helpful to easily identify the type of artificial gamma emitters and its activity concentration in water, specially in the case of reactor incidents or accidents, by removing the background activities, scattering effect inside water, and most importantly complex spectral components such as Compton continuum and escape peaks. The developed algorithm is based on the Monte Carlo simulation of ideal gamma energy spectrum for a uniformly distributed source in a sample tank and its comparison with measurements.