Ninth
International Conference on Radiation Shielding
(ICRS9)
This
conference was held from 17-22 October 1999 at Tsukuba, Japan and was sponsored
and organised by JAERI. A large number of presentations concerned the use
of MC in shielding applications. However, it was found that in order to obtain
appropriate solutions correctly and efficiently in this field a good knowledge
of the method and experience are still required. In shielding, MC methods
have now moved beyond a demonstration phase, it is now used widely also in
industrial applications.
At
the conference the extended capabilities of MC radiation transport codes for
shielding applications were presented covering coupled neutron-gamma, electron-photon
and hadron problems, both for low and high particle energies. Applications
concerned reactor shields and pressure vessel dosimetry, dose-equivalent estimation
around fuel shipping packages, fusion blanket neutronics, streaming in ducts
and cavities, neutron and gamma skyshine. Accelerator shielding and radiation
protection used in basic, technological and medical research including studies
on chromosomal aberrations were also covered. Uncertainty analysis of radiation
shielding with MC were addressed as well as adjoint detector calculations.
One paper overviewed recent activities of MC simulation in Japan (K. Sakurai
et al.) and concluded that the following topics need further addressing and
research:
- development
of versatile automatic variance reduction methods;
- error
estimation of MC burnup calculations;
- development
of perturbation calculation;
- development
of quasi-random methods for calculations with extremely large numbers
of histories;
- development
of user-friendly three-dimensional input interface;
- speed-up
of MC calculation;
- development
of automatic dynamic load balancing for parallel calculation.
In conclusion, the MC method is most valuable for radiation shielding applications
and is used very widely.