THE ADVANCES IN RADIATION PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY AND SOME SUGGESTIONS

Radiation processing technology has been made great advances in the last decade especially in the developed cotmtries. According to the conservative evaluation, the total sales of radiation processing products approached about 2—3 billon U. S. dollar in 1981.there after, the processing capacity at least doubles. Now, the intensities of ~(60)Co in use for radiation processing are (5.55—7.40)×10~(18) Bq and there are about 600 sets of electron accelerators for radiation processing. The total sales of radiation processing products are supposed to be over 10 billon U.S. dollar in 1989. However, there are only several fields commercialized. In great scale, such as radiation crosslinked heat shrinkable materials, radiation crosslinked electric cables and wires, and radiation sterilization of medical articles. In China, the radiation processing technology has been developed rapidly in the past years, but the processing capacity is still lower in comparing with developed countries. We suggest that much attention should be devoted to the training of the workers, technicians and managers. The basic theoretical and new technological researches are the keys for developing radiation processing technology at high spced in our country.