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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Latest News
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.
R. D. M. Garcia, C. E. Siewert, J. R. Thomas Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 2 | May 2017 | Pages 103-119
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1273627
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The long-standing problem of implementing the PN method effectively for spherical geometry is revisited in this work. It is shown that a least-squares approach to the method resolves to a great extent the numerical instability reported for the first time by Aronson in 1984. In the proposed version of the method, a small loss of accuracy is still observed for intermediate orders of the approximation, but in high order (typically N ≥ 199), full accuracy is recovered, and the method can be used with confidence even for extremely high orders of the approximation. Numerical results of benchmark quality are tabulated for the quantities of interest for two basic transport problems in spherical geometry: the albedo problem for a sphere and the critical-sphere problem, both including cases that show the effects of scattering anisotropy described by the binomial law.