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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
AM Workshops
MCNP6 Michael Rising (LANL)
RAPID Ali Haghighat (Virginia Tech Northern Virginia Center)
PHITS Tatsuhiko Ogawa (JAEA)
Fluka Vasilis Vlachoudis (CERN)
PM Workshops
Attila4MC Andrew Cooper (Silver Fir Software)
ADVANTG Bor Kos (ORNL)
RayXpert Antoine Ghilardi (TRAD Tests and Radiations)
PHITS is a general-purpose Monte Carlo particle transport simulation code developed under collaboration between Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA), Research Organization for Information Science and Technology (RIST), and several institutes all over the world. It can deal with the transport of nearly all particles over wide energy ranges, using several nuclear reaction models and nuclear data libraries. PHITS can support your researches in the fields of accelerator technology, radiotherapy, space radiation, and in many other fields which are related to particle and heavy ion transport phenomena. See PHITS website in more detail. (http://phits.jaea.go.jp)
If you would like to attend the course, you have to obtain the license of the latest version of PHITS. It is free of charge, and the instruction to get the license is given below (https://phits.jaea.go.jp/howtoget.html). When you submit the application form via PHITS website, please select “Submission of application form” in the contact page of PHITS website, and write “I would like to attend PHITS course in ICRS-14/RPSD-202, Sept 2020” in the message body.
Attendees must bring a laptop PC with either Windows or Mac OS. This tutorial course is intended for researchers who are familiar with Monte Carlo particle transport simulation. Attendees will learn the basic usage of PHITS, highlighting difference between the input formats of PHITS and other codes.
This workshop will revisit several of the MCNP6.2 new features and tools as well as a sneak preview of many of the new features and improvements included in the upcoming MCNP6.3 code release that are most relevant to the nuclear radiation protection and shielding communities. While the finer details of the workshop will be forthcoming, a few of the topics to expect at this workshop include:
Participants will be provided with workshop slides, examples and any corresponding documentation. Instructors will be available to discuss participant questions regarding the workshop materials and their specific application needs.
Attila4MC provides MCNP® 6.2 users with a graphical user interface based environment to set up, run, and visualize MCNP unstructured mesh solutions from complex CAD geometries. Attila4MC also includes the unstructured mesh Attila deterministic solver for weight windows variance reduction using the CADIS and FW-CADIS methods.
In this workshop, new and existing features of Attila4MC will be demonstrated on a realistic shielding example. The new Attila4MC mesh generator will also be introduced, which is capable of building unstructured mesh models from dirty CAD assemblies with interferences and hundreds or thousands of parts. Other new features will also be demonstrated, including the LDAS (linear discontinuous adaptive step) spatial discretization algorithm for CADIS and FW-CADIS, which produces accurate and smooth solutions for efficient weight windows.
The second half of this workshop is hands-on, where attendees will set up, run, and visualize a deep penetration shielding model starting with a CAD model. Both the CADIS and FW-CADIS variance reduction models will be employed. A secondary solution will also be generated using the Attila deterministic solver. Attendees wishing to run Attila4MC should bring a Windows 10 or 11 laptop with at least 6 GB of RAM. Attendees wishing to also run MCNP must have MCNP 6.2.0 installed. Attendees are invited to bring their own CAD models (Parasolid® or ACIS® formats preferable), as the last hour will include an optional open workshop allowing users to work through their own models with help from Silver Fir Software instructors.
The workshop will conclude with a 30 minute demonstration by Kinectrics of ADEPT, a first-of-its-kind application that leverages the latest virtual reality (VR) technologies to generate an interactive 3D scenario for visualizing and modifying dose rate fields and isotopic activities. The dose rate fields used for input can be generated from Attila/Attila4MC calculations, and from actual scans of radioactive sources. Kinectrics has expanded on ADEPT’s capabilities by partnering with Cavendish Nuclear to create the ADEPT-PSIM process which utilizes the Cavendish PSIM tool to more accurately characterize radioactive sources from multiple rad scans.
All attendees will receive a 1 month license of Attila4MC following the workshop. For any questions regarding the workshop, contact support@silverfirsoftware.com.
ADVANTG is a software package that generates variance reduction parameters (space- and energy-dependent weight windows and biased source probabilities) that can substantially improve the convergence rate of fixed-source neutron and photon radiation transport simulations using MCNP. ADVANTG implements the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) method to accelerate individual tallies and the Forward-Weighted CADIS (FW-CADIS) method to obtain nearly uniform statistical precision across multiple tallies and large mesh tallies. Additionally, ADVANTG 3.2.0 has the capability to produce variance reduction parameters based on the Multi Step CADIS (MS-CADIS) methodology for optimal calculations of delayed gamma radiation fields such as the shutdown dose rate (SDDR) in fusion facilities.
The workshop will discuss the theoretical background of the methods implemented in ADVANTG before moving on to a demonstration of the use of CADIS and FW-CADIS methods on test cases. The workshop will also include a tutorial on how to visualize the discretized geometry, source and discrete ordinates solutions using the open-source VisIt software (https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/). Common issues when using variance reduction will be discussed alongside some best practices and suggestions for ADVANTG workflows.
ADVANTG has been used in a variety of radiation transport applications at ORNL as well as other organizations. Some recent advanced applications will be presented and discussed, including the use of ADVANTG for pressure vessel fluence predictions, neutron fluence and radiation heating in LWR concrete bioshields, and in the workflow for determining SDDR in the JET and ITER fusion facilities.
Prof. Alireza Haghighat, Virginia Tech
RAPID (Real-time Analysis for Particle-transport In-situ Detection) is developed based on the MRT (Multi-stage Response-function particle Transport) methodology that enables its real-time simulation capability. The current version of RAPID is capable of simulating nuclear systems such as spent fuel pools, spent fuel casks, and reactor cores. RAPID solves for pin-wise, axially-dependent fission density, critical/subcritical multiplication, and detector response. Recently, new algorithm for 3-D fuel burnup (bRAPID) calculation and reactor kinetics (tRAPID) have been developed and benchmarked for test problems. These algorithms are experimentally validated using the Jozef Stefan Institute’s TRIGA research reactor.
Further, a multi-user virtual reality system (VRS) has been developed that provides a web application for input preparation, real-time simulation, and output processing and visualization in a virtual environment. For an introduction, please view the following demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q2ytjBrmXc
Topics to be covered
Requirements
There will be access to wireless internet so that the participants can have remote access to VRSRAPID. The current version of VRS-RAPID is optimized for a Personal Computer using the Google Chrome browser, but it can be accessed through iPad, Tablet, etc. using any other browser. To facilitate establishing individual accounts, participants are encouraged to contact Prof. Haghighat prior to the workshop.
RayXpert is a 3D modeling software associated to a Monte Carlo calculation code for the Nuclear and Medical fields. Our Monte Carlo code is based on GEANT4, but totally re-developed by our company TRAD Tests & Radiations since 2000s.Thanks to the different tools RayXpert offer you, you will be able to optimize the design of your shielding with 3D mapping and scripting functionalities.If you are provided with the CAD files corresponding to your electron beams for example, this will even easier to model your case since RayXpert can import directly CAD file (STEP format) so that you don't have to re-model everything.You will also be able to compute the dose rate and deposited dose in terms of Gy in the different shapes you are interested in, or in terms of Sv (H*(10) definition or other dosimetric factor) for radioprotection purposes. And the system allows you to launch your calculation on your Linux or Windows cluster of computers with the distributed computation module.Finally, the software is validated comparing to MCNPX, for Gamma and Beta energies from 1 keV to 100 MeV, and for Neutron from 10^-11 MeV to 20MeV, and it is used worldwide (including US) by more than 40 companies.During the workshop we will present you the main functionalities of RayXpert through a real case study: the design of our own bunkers in which we have a Co60 and an electron beam source. From the design of the building to the shielding design of our home-made electron generator.Participant will be provided with the software at the beginning of the workshop that we will install in live on your computers, and let you use the 3D model we will work on to setting up the sources and materials, launch calculations and optimize the shielding.Presentation performed by a Nuclear Physicist from TRAD Tests & Radiations.
The FLUKA (http://fluka.cern) code is a general purpose Monte Carlo code simulating the interaction and transport of hadrons, leptons, photons and nuclei from keV energies (with the exception of neutrons, tracked down to thermal energies) to cosmic ray energies in any material and in complex geometries.
FLUKA is used for a wide range of applications, spanning from accelerator design and shielding, radiation protection, particle and cosmic ray physics, dosimetry, detector simulation to particle therapy. The workshop will provide a general overview of the code along with an interactive demonstration of its capabilities and a few hands on exercises. It will offer also the opportunity to the participants to come in contact with the developers and discuss their applications.
The participants are required to have downloaded and installed beforehand on their laptops, the FLUKA code together with its graphical user interface http://cern.ch/flair to fully benefit from the tutorial.
The code is available free of charge from http://fluka.cern
Last modified September 21, 2022, 12:44pm PDT
