A study on the cost of concrete shielding in a conventional radiotherapy facility room

Abstract

Ionizing radiations produced by particle accelerators is widely used for the treatment of cancer. In particular high-energy photon beams generated by electron linear accelerators play an important role in external beam radiation therapy, provided that millions of people will undergo cancer in the next decades and radiotherapy is the major kind of treatment used worldwide. An interesting question is how to estimate the thicknesses of the walls of the facility room in order to prevent their vicinities to receive a radiation dose above the permissible levels. In this work we present a simplified general formalism for the estimation of the concrete wall thicknesses of a facility room housing linear accelerators that produce photon beams of high-energies varying from 4 up to 30 MeV. A computer code based on FORTRAN programming language was developed, which allow us to handle with all the input parameters in a fast and simple way. The overall results have shown a slight linear growth of the total volume and associated cost of concrete shielding with the surface available to construct the facility vault.