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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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INL makes a case for eliminating ALARA and setting higher dose limits
A report just released by Idaho National Laboratory reviews decades of radiation protection standards and research on the health effects of low-dose radiation and recommends that the current U.S. annual occupational dose limit of 5,000 mrem be maintained without applying ALARA—the “as low as reasonably achievable” regulatory concept first introduced in 1971—below that threshold.
Noting that epidemiological studies “have consistently failed to demonstrate statistically significant health effects at doses below 10,000 mrem delivered at low dose rates,” the report also recommends “future consideration of increasing this limit to 10,000 mrem/year with appropriate cumulative-dose constraints.”
Gabriel Kooreman, Farzad Rahnema
Nuclear Technology | Volume 192 | Number 3 | December 2015 | Pages 264-277
Technical Paper | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT14-150
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The hybrid Diffusion-Transport Homogenization (DTH) method has been improved by replacing the assembly-level fixed-source calculation step with a fixed number of whole-core transport sweeps following each homogenization step. Like the unmodified DTH method, the Enhanced hybrid Diffusion-Transport Homogenization (EDTH) method adds an “auxiliary cross-section” term to the right side of the transport equation in order to maintain consistency with the heterogeneous equation. As an improvement to the DTH method, the on-the-fly rehomogenization step of the EDTH method utilizes a fixed number of full-core transport sweeps in lieu of assembly-level fixed-source heterogeneous transport calculations. The EDTH method has been tested in one-dimensional reactor core benchmark problems typical of a boiling water reactor core, a gas-cooled thermal reactor [High Temperature Test Reactor (HTTR)] core, and a pressurized water reactor core with mixed-oxide fuel. The method has been shown to reproduce the heterogeneous transport flux profile with 0 to 46 pcm eigenvalue error and 0.1% to 1.8% mean relative flux error with a speedup factor of 1.4 to 4.5 times faster than the DTH method. This represents a speedup of 3.0 to 12.5 times compared to fine-mesh transport.