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The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
Ahmad K. Al-Basheer, Glenn E. Sjoden, Monica Ghita
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 3 | March 2010 | Pages 252-262
Technical Paper | Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9377
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Dosimetry problems inherently involve dose determinations among widely varying materials and densities, and may require complex, detailed investigations of the angular, spatial, and energy behavior of the applied radiation transporting throughout the simulation geometry. Traditionally, Monte Carlo codes have been implemented in solving these types of problems using voxelized geometries and phantoms. The motivation of this work is to investigate the discretization requirements for deterministic radiation transport simulations for these problems via direct solutions of the linear Boltzmann transport equation, focusing on the discrete ordinates (SN) method. The SN method can yield accurate global solutions, provided the inherent discretizations among the angular, spatial, and energy domains properly represent problem physics. In this paper, the SN approach is implemented using a three-dimensional (3-D) 60Co photon transport simulation to highlight the critical issues encountered in performing deterministic photon simulations in dosimetry problems. Calculations were performed using the PENTRAN parallel SN code to obtain a 3-D distribution of flux and dose computed using a collisional kerma approximation. For an acceptable result, we determined that a minimum angular Legendre-Chebychev quadrature of S32 with P3 anisotropy is required, with block-adaptive meshes on the order of 1 cm, even in air regions, implemented with an adaptive differencing scheme (implemented in the PENTRAN code) to yield optimal solution convergence. Also, photon cross-section libraries should be carefully evaluated for the problem studied; for our test problem, the BUGLE-96 photon library yielded the closest results to Monte Carlo (MCNP5) among those tested. Overall, this work details the levels of discretization involved in performing deterministic computations in dosimetry problems and will be useful in enabling future efforts to perform rapid deterministic computations of phantom doses.