Speaker
Description
The climate change is, with the finite amounts of resources and the loss in biodiversity, one of the major socio-ecological problems faced by humanity. They have been recognized as urgent matters by international bodies, and regular national recommendations or international agreements set scopes to be reached in the next few decades or even years. As these scopes appear as simultaneously insufficient and challenging, there is a consensus on the fact that all activities should work on reducing their greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, and their material and biodiversity footprints. Sustainability aspects therefore recently received an increasing interest in the high energy physics community.
For new projects or extensions, studies showed that concrete is an important source of GHG emissions and of non-recyclable material. While concrete can not be easily avoided for elements like the tunnel vaults, the concrete blocs used for shielding against ionizing radiations could instead be made of more sustainable materials.
I will present various possible sustainable materials and explain why their shielding properties can be expected to be similar to those of concrete. I will then show the results of calculations and of preliminary measurements for shielding against photons, from energies dominated by Compton scattering to energies at which an electromagnetic shower is created. Finally, I will also show that several sustainable materials could be suitable shieldings to neutrons.