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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Y. F. Chen, R. J. Sheu, S. H. Jiang, J. N. Wang, U. T. Lin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 343-350
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12306
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Based on the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) methodology, MAVRIC is a new computational sequence in the SCALE6 code package that is designed to perform efficient Monte Carlo simulation for a complicated and difficult shielding problem. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of MAVRIC with the latest cross-section library in calculating the surface dose rates of a realistic spent-fuel storage cask. Detailed dose rate profiles over the cask side and top surfaces were calculated, and the results were compared with our previous work using SAS4 and MCNP. In order to duplicate the same source model, the MAVRIC code has been modified to accommodate a user-defined axial source distribution. The comparison among the three codes was evaluated in terms of their accuracies and computational efficiencies. For the gamma-ray sources, the MAVRIC-calculated results are more accurate than SAS4 and consistent with those predicted by the continuous-energy MCNP calculations. Meanwhile, its computational efficiencies are comparable to the performance of the TORT-coupled MCNP calculations. For the fuel neutron source, the MAVRIC calculation with broad-group cross sections cannot give satisfactory result, and its computational performance is also a factor of [approximately]10 less efficient than that of TORT-coupled MCNP. With a fine-group cross-section library, MAVRIC can provide a better prediction but still underestimates the surface dose rates of the cask by 15 to 30%.
