Well, in progress anyway. Due to a rather dramatic (est factor 2800) increase in net fusion here, a dose for the operator that used to be around 10x the background (for X rays and other geiger type things) went up, well, about that factor. That's not acceptable. I'm no stranger to danger, but it's because I see it and do things to prevent my own harm, and here's a case of that, a very loud one, in fact.
I've been spending the last week casting cerro-safe bricks, straightening lead (still lots more to do, along with removing the enormous ant colony that tried to live there, evidently, oxidized lead doesn't bother ants so you can notice), and so on. Curtis Faith and I spent a weekend getting borax (from McMaster, the store stuff has fine silica in it that ruins it for this) to dissolve in enough pure ethylene glycol to fill up an 8x8x4" glass block which will go over my tank's viewport, and still be behind the radiology lead glass we've been using all along. All this to be mounted in a 26" by 24" wood sheet, covered with lead both sides, with a hole for the view, and a small cutout so I can still read and operate the pump controls. Tradeoff here - there's only so much I can lift. So we're going to try 2mm lead on both sides of the wood at first (heck, that glass block isn't light when full of saturated solution either). I'm kind of going backwards here - this is the last line of defense for the operator. As much as possible, there will be other shielding nearer the original source(s) of the rads as well, and some of those uber thick cerro-safe blocks below the cart table surface for the family jewel shielding.
Like I said, work in progress. Here's what it looks like as I type this:
Of course, there will be some capture gammas from neutrons captured in boron in the block no matter what, and at these energies, the amount of lead required to stop them is serious. We're letting the inverse square law do some of the work here - the main action is a couple feet behind all this already. The point is cutting the total dose the operator(s) - mostly me, get in a run. We can only make the runs so short and be sure we're not seeing flukes - as in statistics lie when you don't have enough samples, even if you're honest.
In case anyone forgot, this is what this is going in front of.
More as I make more progess. This is a lot more labor intensive than it looks.