Optimized design of a facility for measuring sodium-24 in blood by using Monte Carlo simulations

The Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport Code is adopted for numerical calculations and simulation analyses of the parameters for the designed irradiation facility for human blood (including the neutron moderator and its thickness, the neutron source’s location, and the collimator’s radius) and of the parameters for the unit for measuring human blood (such as the crystal thickness and radius of NaI) to measure the activity of 24Na in the human body exposed to neutron irradiation in nuclear accidents. Calculation results show that the most suitable parameters for the irradiation facility for human blood include 6-cm polyethylene as the neutron moderator, collimator radius of 7 mm, and a neutron source placed at the bottom of the collimator. However, the parameters for the unit to measure human blood are as follows: both the thickness and the radius of the crystal at the bottom of the NaI detector are 5 cm. The effectiveness of the design parameters was verified by using actual experiments.