The objective of this project is to provide a new undergraduate laboratory course in environmental health physics that can be taken by junior students from environmental engineering, nuclear engineering, and engineering physics, as well as students from other disciplines. This new laboratory course is developed based upon the existing nuclear engineering laboratory courses. However, new experiments with emphasis on environmental radioactive waste characterization using gamma-spectroscopy technology are being developed and added to the course. The project provides an HPGe detector system. Other experiments using existing equipment can be upgraded. The whole course is redesigned to facilitate problem-based learning which can be enhanced by extensive use of multimedia computer tools for data acquisition, analysis, and visualization. Such a modern interdisciplinary laboratory course provides much needed hands-on experience for students in some of the very demanding technical areas including environmental restoration, nuclear waste management, environmental risk assessment, radioactive and mixed waste disposal, and reliability and safety analysis. *
