Shielding design and analyses of KIPT neutron source facility

Abstract

Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) of USA and Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT) of Ukraine have been collaborating on the conceptual design development of a neutron source facility. An electron accelerator drives a sub-critical facility (ADS) is used for generating the neutron source. The facility will be utilized for performing basic and applied nuclear researches, producing medical isotopes, and training young nuclear specialists. Monte Carlo code MCNPX has been utilized as the major design tool for the design, due to its capability to transport electrons, photons, and neutrons at high energies. However the ADS shielding calculations with MCNPX need enormous computational resources and the small neutron yield per electron makes sampling difficulty for the Monte Carlo calculations. The high energy electrons ( E > 100 MeV) generate very high energy neutrons and these neutrons dominant the total radiation dose outside the shield. The radiation dose caused by high energy neutrons is ∼3–4 orders of magnitude higher than that of the photons. However, the high energy neutron fraction within the total generated neutrons is very small, which increases the sampling difficulty and the required computational time. To solve these difficulties, the user subroutines of MCNPX are utilized to generate a neutron source file, which record the generated neutrons from the photonuclear reactions caused by electrons. This neutron source file is utilized many times in the following MCNPX calculations for weight windows (importance function) generation and radiation dose calculations. In addition, the neutron source file can be sampled multiple times to improve the statistics of the calculated results. In this way the expensive electron transport calculations can be performed once with good statistics for the different ADS shielding problems. This paper presents the method of generating and utilizing the neutron source file by MCNPX for the ADS shielding calculation and similar accelerator facilities, and the accurate radiation dose analyses outside the shield using modest computational resources.