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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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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.
Yunhuang Zhang, Jean C. Ragusa, Jim E. Morel
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 194 | Number 10 | October 2020 | Pages 903-926
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1771141
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Simplified () approximation is often used to model radiation transport phenomena, but it converges to the true solution of the transport equation only in one-dimensional slab geometry. In all other geometries, it incurs a model error that needs to be quantified. In this paper, we estimate the radiation transport model error due to the approximation and employ transport solutions (with high order) as reference transport solutions. Because the solution does not contain the full angular information of the transport solution, an angular intensity must be reconstructed from the solution in order to compute the model error. We propose two such reconstruction schemes. Model error estimates are given for various quantities of interests, i.e., scalar radiation intensity, radiation flux, and boundary leakage. An adjoint-based approach is proposed to evaluate the model error and is compared against forward and residual techniques. Two-dimensional numerical experiments are presented.