PANDORA Project for the study of photonuclear reactions below

Tamii, Atsushi*; Pellegri, L.*; Sderstrm, P.-A.*; Allard, D.*; Goriely, S.*; Inakura, Tsunenori*; Khan, E.*; Kido, Eiji*; Kimura, Masaaki*; Litvinova, E.*; et al.

European Physical Journal A, 59(9), p.208_1 - 208_21, 2023/09

https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-01081-w

no abstracts in English

Assessment of radioactive contamination and effectiveness of remedial measures in urban environments, Report of Working Group 2, Modelling and Data for Radiological Impact Assessments (MODARIA) Programme

Boznar, M. Z.*; Charnock, T. W.*; Chouhan, S. L.*; Grsic, Z.*; Halsall, C.*; Heinrich, G.*; Helebrant, J.*; Hettrich, S.*; Kua, P.*; Mancini, F.*; et al.

IAEA-TECDOC-2001, 226 Pages, 2022/06

https://www.iaea.org/publications/15122/assessment-of-radioactive-contamination-and-effectiveness-of-remedial-measures-in-urban-environments

The IAEA organized a programme from 2012 to 2015 entitled Modelling and Data for Radiological Impact Assessments (MODARIA), which aimed to improve capabilities in the field of environmental radiation dose assessment by acquiring improved data, model testing and comparison of model inputs, assumptions and outputs, reaching a consensus on modelling philosophies, aligning approaches and parameter values, developing improved methods and exchanging information. This publication describes the activities of Working Group 2, Exposures in Contaminated Urban Environments and Effect of Remedial Measures.

The Fe(n,)Fe cross section from the surrogate ratio method and its effect on the Fe nucleosynthesis

Yan, S. Q.*; Li, X. Y.*; Nishio, Katsuhisa; Lugaro, M.*; Li, Z. H.*; Makii, Hiroyuki; Pignatari, M.*; Wang, Y. B.*; Orlandi, R.; Hirose, Kentaro; et al.

Astrophysical Journal, 919(2), p.84_1 - 84_7, 2021/10

https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac12ce

Evaluation report of Task 9B based on comparisons and analyses of modelling results for the sp HRL LTDE-SD experiments

Soler, J. M.*; Meng, S.*; Moreno, L.*; Neretnieks, I.*; Liu, L.*; Keklinen, P.*; Hokr, M.*; ha, J.*; Vetenk, A.*; Reimitz, D.*; et al.

SKB TR-20-17, 71 Pages, 2021/07

Task 9B of the SKB Task Force on Modelling of Groundwater Flow and Transport of Solutes in fractured rock focused on the modelling of experimental results from the LTDE-SD in situ tracer test performed at the sp Hard Rock Laboratory in Sweden. Ten different modelling teams provided results for this exercise, using different concepts and codes. Three main types of modelling approaches were used: (1) analytical solutions to the transport-retention equations, (2) continuum-porous-medium numerical models, and (3) microstructure-based models accounting for small-scale heterogeneity (i.e. mineral grains and microfracture distributions). The modelling by the different teams allowed the comparison of many different model concepts, especially in terms of potential zonations of rock properties (porosity, diffusion, sorption), such as the presence of a disturbed zone at the rock and fracture surface, the potential effects of micro- and cm-scale fractures.

International network of nuclear structure and decay data evaluators

Dimitriou, P.*; Basunia, S*; Bernstein, L.*; Chen, J.*; Elekes, Z.*; Huang, X.*; Hurst, A.*; Iimura, Hideki; Jain, A. K.*; Kelley, J.*; et al.

EPJ Web of Conferences, 239, p.15004_1 - 15004_4, 2020/09

BB2020-0008.pdf:0.34MB

https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202023915004

The Evaluated Nuclear Structure Data File (ENSDF) includes the most extensive and comprehensive set of nuclear structure and decay data evaluations performed by the international network of Nuclear Structure and Decay Data evaluators (NSDD) under the auspices of the IAEA. In this report we describe some of the recent NSDD activities and provide future perspectives.

Numerical simulation on self-leveling behavior of mixed particle beds using multi-fluid model coupled with DEM

Phan, L. H. S.*; Ohara, Yohei*; Kawata, Ryo*; Liu, X.*; Liu, W.*; Morita, Koji*; Guo, L.*; Kamiyama, Kenji; Tagami, Hirotaka

Proceedings of 12th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal-Hydraulics, Operation and Safety (NUTHOS-12) (USB Flash Drive), 12 Pages, 2018/10

Self-leveling behavior of core fuel debris beds is one of the key phenomena for the safety assessment of core disruptive accidents (CDAs) in sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs). The SIMMER code has been developed for CDA analysis of SFRs, and the code has been successfully applied to numerical simulations for key thermal-hydraulic phenomena involved in CDAs as well as reactor safety assessment. However, in SIMMER's fluid-dynamics model, it is always difficult to represent the strong interactions between solid particles as well as the discrete particle characteristics. To solve this problem, a new method has been developed by combining the multi-fluid model of the SIMMER code with the discrete element method (DEM) for the solid phase to reasonably simulate the particle behaviors as well as the fluid-particle interactions in multi-phase flows. In this study, in order to validate the multi-fluid model of the SIMMER code coupled with DEM, numerical simulations were performed on a series of self-leveling experiments using a gas injection method in cylindrical particle beds. The effects of friction coefficient on the simulation results were investigated by sensitivity analysis. Though more extensive validations are needed, the reasonable agreement between simulation results and corresponding experimental data preliminarily demonstrates the potential ability of the present method in simulating the self-leveling behaviors of debris bed. It is expected that the SIMMER code coupled with DEM is a prospective computational tool for analysis of safety issues related to solid particle debris bed in SFRs.

The Application of radiochronometry during the 4th collaborative materials exercise of the nuclear forensics international technical working group (ITWG)

Kristo, M. J.*; Williams, R.*; Gaffney, A. M.*; Kayzar-Boggs, T. M.*; Schorzman, K. C.*; Lagerkvist, P.*; Vesterlund, A.*; Ramebck, H.*; Nelwamondo, A. N.*; Kotze, D.*; et al.

Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, 315(2), p.425 - 434, 2018/02

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10967-017-5680-5

In a recent international exercise, 10 international nuclear forensics laboratories successfully performed radiochronometry on three low enriched uranium oxide samples, providing 12 analytical results using three different parent-daughter pairs serving as independent chronometers. The vast majority of the results were consistent with one another and consistent with the known processing history of the materials. In general, for these particular samples, mass spectrometry gave more accurate and more precise analytical results than decay counting measurements. In addition, the concordance of the U-Pa and U-Th chronometers confirmed the validity of the age dating assumptions, increasing confidence in the resulting conclusions.

Implementation of tetrahedral-mesh geometry in Monte Carlo radiation transport code PHITS

Furuta, Takuya; Sato, Tatsuhiko; Han, M. C.*; Yeom, Y. S.*; Kim, C. H.*; Brown, J. L.*; Bolch, W. E.*

Physics in Medicine & Biology, 62(12), p.4798 - 4810, 2017/06

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6560/aa6b45

A new function to treat tetrahedral-mesh geometry, a type of polygon-mesh geometry, was implemented in the Particle and Heavy Ion Transport code Systems (PHITS). Tetrahedral-mesh is suitable to describe complex geometry including curving shapes. In addition, construction of three-dimensional geometry using CAD software becomes possible with file format conversion. We have introduced a function to create decomposition maps of tetrahedral-mesh objects at the initial process so that the computational time for transport process can be reduced. Owing to this function, transport calculation in tetrahedral-mesh geometry can be as fast as that for the geometry in voxel-mesh with the same number of meshes. Due to adaptability of tetrahedrons in size and shape, dosimetrically equivalent objects can be represented by tetrahedrons with much fewer number of meshes compared with the voxels. For dosimetric calculation using computational human phantom, significant acceleration of the computational speed, about 4 times, was confirmed by adopting the tetrahedral mesh instead of the voxel.

Population and decay of a = 8 two-quasineutron isomer in Pu

Hota, S.*; Tandel, S.*; Chowdhury, P.*; Ahmad, I.*; Carpenter, M. P.*; Chiara, C. J.*; Greene, J. P.*; Hoffman, C. R.*; Jackson, E. G.*; Janssens, R. V. F.*; et al.

Physical Review C, 94(2), p.021303_1 - 021303_5, 2016/08

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.94.021303

The decay of a = 8 isomer in Pu and the collective band structure populating the isomer are studied using deep inelastic excitations with Ti and Pb beams, respectively. Precise measurements of branching ratios in the band confirm a clean 9/2[734]7/2[624] for the isomer, validating the systematics of K = 8 two-quasineutron isomers observed in even-, = 150 isotones. These isomers around the deformed shell gap at = 152 provide critical benchmarks for theoretical predictions of single-particle energies in this gateway region to superheavy nuclei.

Fission barrier of superheavy nuclei and persistence of shell effects at high spin; Cases of No and Th

Henning, G.*; Khoo, T. L.*; Lopez-Martens, A.*; Seweryniak, D.*; Alcorta, M.*; Asai, Masato; Back, B. B.*; Bertone, P. F.*; Boilley, D.*; Carpenter, M. P.*; et al.

Physical Review Letters, 113(26), p.262505_1 - 262505_6, 2014/12

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.262505

Fission barrier heights of a shell-stabilized superheavy nucleus No have been determined as a function of spin up to 19 through the measured distribution of entry points of deexcitations in the excitation energy vs. spin plane. The fission barrier height of No was determined to be 6.0 MeV at spin 15, and 6.6 MeV at spin 0 by extrapolation. This demonstrates that the shell effect actually enlarges the fission barrier in such heavy nuclei and keeps the barrier high even at high spin.