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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.
Stefan Meyer, Ivan Otic, Xu Cheng
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 184 | Number 3 | November 2016 | Pages 377-387
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE16-6
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the framework of a description of melt pool heat transfer under severe accident conditions, we introduce a computational fluid dynamics approach for the phase change based on the phase-field method. The approach is derived using the formalism of irreversible thermodynamics and depends on a phenomenological expression for the free energy of binary eutectic alloys. The free energy is constructed to describe sharp interfaces on sufficiently small length scales and is capable of representing the appearance of mushy layers in a volume-averaged large-scale perspective. In particular, a dynamic calculation procedure for the diffuse interface width is introduced based on free energy minimization. Numerical simulations using this approach are performed and compared with experimental and numerical results from the literature. These comparisons demonstrate that the new model improves numerical simulation results and is able to describe the dynamics of sharp and diffuse interfaces.