Designing an epithermal neutron beam for boron neutron capture therapy for a DIDO type reactor using MCNP

Abstract

This paper describes work undertaken to design an epithermal neutron beam for a DIDO type reactor for use in boron neutron capture therapy, a form of cancer treatment. It involved extensive use of MCNP, a Monte Carlo computer code. Initially, calculations were made with MCNP to simulate earlier experiments with an epithermal beam on the DIDO reactor. This comparison made it possible both to validate the Monte Carlo modelling of the reactor and to gain an insight into the important features of the simulation. Following this, MCNP was used to design a filtered epithermal neutron beam facility for DIDO's largest beam tube, a 13.7 cm radius horizontal tube which extends radially away from the core. First a selection was made of the optimum filter components for the beam. Then the research concentrated on combining these filter elements to construct a practical epithermal beam design. The results suggest that the optimum method of generating the epithermal neutron source is to employ a filter combination consisting principally of liquid argon with the addition of cadmium, aluminium, titanium and possibly tin. The calculations also show that the resultant neutron beam would have a flux greater than 1.0 × 109 n cm−2 s−1 and have sufficiently low fast-neutron and gamma-ray contamination.