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Reimagining nuclear materials for the future of medicine
Nuclear medicine has come a long way since Henri Becquerel first observed the penetrating energy of radioactive materials in 1896. Today, technetium-99m alone is used in more than 40 million diagnostic procedures every year—from cardiovascular imaging and bone scans to cancer detection—making it the undisputed workhorse of nuclear medicine. That single statistic tells you something important: An enormous portion of modern diagnostic medicine rests on a surprisingly narrow foundation, one built around a small number of aging research reactors that were never originally designed for continuous isotope production.
C. Rabiti, A. Alfonsi, A. Epiney
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 182 | Number 1 | January 2016 | Pages 104-118
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the RELAP5-3D Computer Code | doi.org/10.13182/NSE14-143
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
PHISICS (Parallel and Highly Innovative Simulation for INL Code System) is a reactor physics package developed at the Idaho National Laboratory. It is composed of several modules: a nodal and semistructured transport core solver (INSTANT), a depletion module (MRTAU), a time-dependent solver (TimeIntegrator), a cross-section interpolation and manipulation framework (MIXER), a criticality search module (CRITICALITY), and a fuel management and shuffling component (SHUFFLE). The PHISICS code has been coupled to the RELAP5-3D thermal-hydraulics code. Flexibility in the coupling among the different modules and with RELAP5-3D allows for several new integrated computational schemes and improvements with respect to current available options using NESTLE/RELAP5-3D. These schemes will be described in this paper. Moreover, the whole PHISICS package is fully parallelized, using the Message Passing Interface protocol. This allows for reduced computational times, while providing the capability to solve very detailed problems.