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Upon tightening new regulations, the demand for using smart wireless sensing for health, safety, and surveillance applications of nuclear installations is growing rapidly. To help with the developments, this paper describes the design of a practical small-scaled wireless sensor network (WSN) that allows a smart real-time monitoring of radiation levels at nuclear facilities. A wireless system compiled with a radiation sensor and associated peripherals been developed and implemented upon ZigBee technology using TI CC2530 chip. The radiation sensor uses a Geiger Muller tube as a reliable detector for the radioactive particulates in the gaseous effluent vented from nuclear facilities. The WSN allows the operators to record and control the radiation levels emitted to the environment and it is supported with a warning system, for the early detection of radiation release. However, building a reliable wireless sensing system with an effective coverage, especially for indoor applications, requires professional planning and proper investigation. In this paper, a procedure to investigate the wireless sensing coverage is reported where a ray-tracing simulator is adopted to enable the wireless node placement prior to the deployment. A real test scenario has been implemented based on the built wireless node to examine network coverage inside a 60-m hallway and results have been compared with simulations showing a 100% packet reception ratio.Index Terms-Wireless sensor networks, ZigBee, nuclear power plant (NPP), environmental monitoring, radiation sensor node.

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