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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.
Robert K. Salko, William D. Pointer, Marc-Oliver Delchini, William L. Gurecky, Kevin T. Clarno, Stuart R. Salttery, Victor Petrov, Annalisa Manera
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 12 | December 2019 | Pages 1697-1706
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1585734
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors is developing a core simulator capability known as the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications (VERA) to address nuclear industry challenge problems such as crud-induced power shift (CIPS). The CTF thermal-hydraulic (T/H) subchannel code provides thermal feedback in the coupled neutronics, T/H, crud chemistry simulation that VERA performs. It has been discovered that the coarse meshing approach used by CTF (in which fuel rods are discretized into four azimuthal segments) can be a source of error in predicting crud growth and boron distribution in VERA CIPS calculations. Spacer grid effects lead to complex rod-to-fluid heat transfer behavior that, when not resolved, can lead to error in the prediction of crud growth and boron deposition. A higher-fidelity computational fluid dynamics approach can be used instead of CTF, but this leads to excessive simulation times. This paper presents an approach for using high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics data to create shape functions that are used in CTF to reconstruct rod surface heat transfer behavior as a function of spacer grid geometry. The approach is demonstrated for a 5 × 5 rod bundle facility with five mixing vane grids under a range of operating conditions encountered in nominal pressurized water reactor conditions. It is demonstrated that the grid heat transfer maps are successful at introducing a higher-fidelity heat transfer modeling capability into CTF.