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Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
P. Cowan, G. Dobson, G. A. Wright, A. Cooper
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 780-784
MC Calculations | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9306
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MCBEND is a well-established Monte Carlo code from The ANSWERS Software Service in the United Kingdom. It is being continually developed to meet the needs of its users. Recent developments to MCBEND are described here. These cover improvements to the underlying physics and data libraries, improvements in calculation efficiency, and improvements to the usability of the code.Recent developments include a Unified Tally option for scoring, including enhanced methods for scoring by material; extension of point energy adjoint calculations to include detailed thermal treatment; incorporation of a covariance library for detector cross sections; a number of new "hole" geometries in which Woodcock tracking takes place, including a tetrahedral mesh hole that imports a converted computer-aided design file; a new collision processor; and automatic meshing for acceleration of gamma-ray calculations.These developments have resulted in more flexibility in scoring, for example, the ability to score by material in regions incorporating Woodcock tracking; potentially more accurate adjoint calculations utilizing thermal detectors; automatic calculation of uncertainty due to detector cross sections; greater flexibility in geometry modeling; improved collision processing, for example, the ability to utilize bound data for thermal neutron transport in graphite; and less user input for efficient calculation acceleration.Some recent developments of MCBEND are described and examples of their use given.