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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The RAIN scale: A good intention that falls short
Radiation protection specialists agree that clear communication of radiation risks remains a vexing challenge that cannot be solved solely by finding new ways to convey technical information.
Earlier this year, an article in Nuclear News described a new radiation risk communication tool, known as the Radiation Index, or, RAIN (“Let it RAIN: A new approach to radiation communication,” NN, Jan. 2025, p. 36). The authors of the article created the RAIN scale to improve radiation risk communication to the general public who are not well-versed in important aspects of radiation exposures, including radiation dose quantities, units, and values; associated health consequences; and the benefits derived from radiation exposures.
C. J. Solomon, A. Sood, T. E. Booth, J. K. Shultis
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 176 | Number 1 | January 2014 | Pages 1-36
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-81
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method for deterministically minimizing the cost of a single Monte Carlo tally employing weight-dependent weight-window variance reduction has been developed. This method relies on deterministic calculations of the tally's variance and average computational time per history, the product of which is the cost (inverse figure of merit) of the tally calculation. The tally's variance is deterministically computed by solving the history-score moment equations that describe the moments of the tally's score distribution, and the average time per history is computed by solving the future time equation that describes the expected amount of computational time a particle and its progeny require to process to termination. Both equations are solved by the Sn method. Results are presented for one- and two-dimensional problems that demonstrate increased calculation efficiency, by factors of 1.1 to 2, of the optimized problems over standard adjoint (importance) biasing.