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More than half of material thefts reported to IAEA occurred during transport
The International Atomic Energy Agency has said that more than half of all thefts of nuclear and other radioactive material reported to the agency’s Incident and Trafficking Database (ITDB) since 1993 occurred during authorized transport, with the share rising to nearly 70 percent in the past decade. The ITDB covers incidents involving nuclear material, radioisotopes, and radioactively contaminated material.
R. J. Sheu, A. Y. Chen, Y.-W. H. Liu, S. H. Jiang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 1 | May 2008 | Pages 23-36
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-23
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this study, discrete ordinates and Monte Carlo methods were applied to solve the radiation transport problem for a simplified spent fuel storage cask considering fixed neutron and gamma-ray sources. The results were compared, and the causes for their differences were investigated. In addition, a hybrid method based on the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) methodology has been adopted to accelerate the Monte Carlo simulations. CADIS utilizes a deterministic adjoint function for variance reduction through source biasing and consistent transport biasing. The problem encountered and its possible solution for applying the source biasing in such a large volume source are described. Compared with the unbiased case, the computational efficiency is improved by a factor of several tens for neutron transport, and the efficiency is increased tremendously by about five orders of magnitude for gamma-ray transport. It has been demonstrated that the biasing scheme applied here is very effective in the shielding calculations for a spent fuel storage cask using the Monte Carlo method.