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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
In transition: Commercializing fusion power
Commercial fusion power is closer than ever. There are now around 30 U.S. fusion companies, several of which claim to be on track to connect to the grid as early as the 2030s.
Tokamak and laser inertial confinement approaches benefit from decades of research at facilities such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and ITER, with alternative concepts including stellarator, magnetic mirror, and Z-pinch confinement also making notable progress as private and government funding for fusion increases.
Kazuo Shin, Hideo Hirayama
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 120 | Number 3 | July 1995 | Pages 211-222
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE95-A24120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An approximating formula recently proposed by the authors for gamma-ray buildup factors of multilayered shields is applied to point isotropic source problems.The formula, which is formulated in vector form with a four-group approximation, handles the gamma-ray energy spectrum directly and uses the transmission and albedo matrices to take gamma-ray transmission and back-scattering effects into consideration. The gamma-ray transmission and back-scattering probabilities through a 1-mean-free-path- (mfp-) thick shell depend on the shell curvature. This phenomenon plays an important role in simulating the gamma-ray buildup factor in point isotropic source geometry. In this model, the dependence is described by simplified expressions. The feasibility of the formula for systematically describing the point isotropic buildup factors was tested by using buildup factors calculated by the Monte Carlo method as reference data. The materials used in the tests were water, iron, and lead, and the source energies assumed were 0.5, 1, and 10MeV. Through the tests, the method was found to reproduce the reference data of double-layered shields of these materials very well. With the same parameters, the buildup factors of three-layered shields are also reproducible. Buildup factors computed with two different group structures were examined to test the adequacy of the energy group structure adopted. The group structure previously adopted was found to be adequate in the energy range of 0.5 to 10 MeV