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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.
Zhongliang Lv, Zhong Chen, Zijia Zhao, Dongmei Pan, Lichao Tian, Xiaohu Yang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 11 | November 2022 | Pages 1721-1733
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2022.2061257
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The multibeam concept for the accelerator-driven subcritical reactor (ADS) has advantages in the power distribution of the core, and it could reduce the requirement of proton beam current intensity for each beam. In comparison with the single-beam concept, the multibeam concept could also reduce the thermal load of the beam window significantly. This paper focuses on the study of external source effects for different multibeam concepts for an ADS for nuclear waste transmutation (ADS-NWT). The different multibeam concepts include the three-beam, four-beam, six-beam, and seven-beam concepts for the ADS-NWT. By using the calculation tools FLUKA and SuperMC with the nuclear data library ENDF/B-VII.1, the variations of the keff and total power, as the function of the position of the spallation targets, are provided for each multibeam concept. The results show that the keff and total power were affected by an interference effect between the spallation targets. For the transport of fission neutrons in the core, the maximum radius of the interference effect between the spallation targets was 40 cm. Considering the transport of spallation neutrons in the ADS-NWT, the maximum radius of the interference effect between the spallation targets was 60 cm. The spallation targets were moved from the inner circle to the outer circle of the fuel zone, and the different variations in keff and total power trend for the three-beam, four-beam, six-beam, and seven-beam concepts for the ADS-NWT were obtained.
