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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.
Kaijie Zhu, Boran Kong, Han Zhang, Jiong Guo, Fu Li
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 1174-1196
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2143706
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Recently, a three-dimensional method of characteristics (MOC) code called Advanced Reactor CHaracteristics tracER (ARCHER) has been developed by the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, to solve the neutron transport problem in high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTRs) with explicit pebble-bed geometry. Although the spatial domain decomposition using the message passing interface (MPI) and the ray parallel using OpenMP have been implemented in the previous version of ARCHER, in order to simulate practical HTR problems it is still necessary to reduce the great computational burden through efficient algorithms. Therefore, the linear source approximation (LSA) scheme, which allows coarser transport calculation grids while maintaining high accuracy, has been added in the latest version of ARCHER to relieve memory pressure together with the MPI-based spatial domain decomposition. Moreover, on-the-fly calculation of the relative position coordinates of the ray segment center can further reduce the memory for storing segment information under LSA. In addition, time-consuming MOC transport sweeps can be reduced greatly with coarse-mesh finite difference (CMFD) acceleration. Numerical results show that both LSA and CMFD acceleration contribute to simulate the practical HTR-10 problem successfully.