Radioactive

Simple library for radiation protection data.

This library provides wrappers for various data sources for easy access in Rust:

• Radiological Toolbox
• Nuclear Decay Data for Dosimetric Calculations
• X-Ray Mass Attenuation Coefficients

Features

• radtoolbox (default): the Radiological Toolbox databases. It uses mdbsql with its feature bundled (mdbtools compiled from source: only a C compiler, no GLib or pkg-config), thus it does not compile for WebAssembly. With --no-default-features, the NIST part compiles for wasm32-unknown-unknown.

X-ray mass attenuation coefficients

The NIST tables of J. H. Hubbell and S. M. Seltzer (NIST Standard Reference Database 126) for the elements Z = 1 to 92, from 1 keV to 20 MeV, are not in the repository. data/download.py --dataset nist_mass_attenuation_coefficient (run in data) writes them to data/XrayMassAttenCoef: Table 1 (material_constants) and Table 3 (one file for each element, 01 to 92). The tests of this data are ignored by default; run them with cargo test -- --ignored after the download.

• NistMassAttenCoef::open(path) reads the files. from_texts takes their text: for a program without file access (WebAssembly).
• element_mass_attenuation_coefficient_at and mass_attenuation_coefficient_at give μ/ρ (cm²/g) at any energy (eV) of the table range, by log-log interpolation. An absorption edge has two rows with the same energy: below the edge energy the value comes from the lower row, at and above it from the upper row.
• MassAttenuationCoefficient::mass_attenuation_coefficient gives the value at a table energy only.