Elsevier

Radiation Measurements

Volume 45, Issue 10, December 2010, Pages 1318-1322
Radiation Measurements

Overview of Monte Carlo radiation transport codes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.radmeas.2010.05.037Get rights and content

Abstract

The Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC) is the designated central repository of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for nuclear software in radiation transport, safety, and shielding. Since the center was established in the early 60’s, there have been several Monte Carlo (MC) particle transport computer codes contributed by scientists from various countries. An overview of the neutron transport computer codes in the RSICC collection is presented.

Introduction

The Radiation Shielding Information Center (RSIC) was established in 1963 in response to the Weinberg Report titled “Science, Government, and Information”. In 1996, RSIC became RSICC to reflect the scope of technical coverage and to keep up with changing computational technology. RSICC is charged by United States government agencies to collect, test, package, and disseminate computational tools used in radiation shielding, transport, and protection. RSICC is the custodian of more than 1700 computational tools gathered from national and international laboratories, educational institutions, and private industry. Together with the Nuclear Energy Agency Data Bank in Paris, France, RSICC serves as an international resource for nuclear computational tools.

Since its inception, RSICC has collected over 200 computer codes involving the Monte Carlo method. A few of them in the area of neutron transport are described in the write-up.

Section snippets

O5R

One of the earliest neutron transport code was the Oak Ridge Random Research Reactor Routine (O5R). O5R was originally written in FORTRAN Assembly Program (FAP) for the IBM 7090.

The O5R (Coveyou et al., 1965) code system was designed to calculate, by Monte Carlo methods, any quantity related to neutron transport in reactor or shielding problems. The system consisted of O5R-STATEST which calculates the neutron flux, for various energy bins, at various points by statistical estimation; and O5R–K

TART

TART2005 (Cullen, 2005) is a coupled neutron-photon, 3-D, combinatorial geometry, time dependent, Monte Carlo transport code. It was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, California. TART2005 is written in Fortran and C and runs under Windows and Linux for PCs and MACs.

Neutron and photon sources as well as neutron-induced photon production can be tracked. TART2005 uses ENDF/B-VI, Release 8 data. It uses continuous energy neutron cross-sections, in addition to

Conclusion

Monte Carlo computer codes continue to be important in radiation transport, shielding and detection studies. The update of software is essential in ensuring that the computational tools today are in-line with the progress in nuclear science and technology.

Acknowledgement

The submitted manuscript has been authored by a contractor of the U.S. Government under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. Accordingly, the U.S. Government retains a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to publish or reproduce the published form of this contribution, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes.

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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