Zhu Guoping

Probabilistic Safety Analysis about the Radiation Risk for the Driver in a Fast-Scan Container/Vehicle Inspection System

A new Container/Vehicle Inspection System called fast-scan inspection system has been developed and used in some countries, which has a special advantage in scanning efficiency of 200~00 containers per hour. However, for its unique scanning mode, the fast-scan inspection system causes some worries about the radiation risk for the truck drivers, who will drive the container truck to pass through the scanning tunnel and might be exposed by the radiation beam in accidents. A PSA analysis, which has been widely used to evaluate the safety of nuclear power plant in the past, is presented here to estimate the probability of accidental exposure to the driver and evaluate the health risk. The fault tree and event tree analysis show that the probability of accidental exposure to the driver is pretty low and the main failure contributions are human errors and scanning control devices failures, which provides some recommendations for the further improvement about this product. Furthermore, on the basic of ICRP No.60 and 76 reports, the health risk to the truck driver is only about 4.0×10-14/a. Compared with the exempt level of 5×10-7/a, it can be concluded that the fast-scan system is safe enough for the truck driver.