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Conference Spotlight
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.
Cong Liu, Junxia Wei, Bin Zhang, Jinhong Li, Zhiqiang Sheng, Shuang Tan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 11 | November 2023 | Pages 2853-2883
Regular Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2169537
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Maintaining a reasonable balance between computational accuracy and overhead is important for neutron transport simulations of engineering problems. This paper presents a goal-oriented mesh adaptive algorithm applied to the multigroup discrete ordinates equation for fixed source and criticality problems. The dual-weighted residual (DWR) approach estimates numerical solution errors and drives local mesh refinement for specific targets, such as detector response, integral flux, and multiplication factor. We employ a reconstruction method to evaluate the spatial residuals of the fluxes obtained by the weighted difference scheme. To improve the performance of adaptive algorithms, new estimation models are proposed for adjoint fluxes needed by the DWR theory, including a regional goal model for fixed source problems and an inconsistent fission source model for k-eigenvalue problems. Additionally, we analyze the impact of the truncation of flux reconstruction and isotropic approximation of adjoint fluxes on grid error indicators and adaptive calculations. Numerical results demonstrate that for the quantities of interest, our adaptive approach saves more than 70% of computational effort and run time when obtaining a level of high accuracy comparable to that of uniform fine grids.