Cerberus Nuclear hosted the 47th Shielding Forum meeting online this week. It had been hoped that the meeting would be held as part of the ANSWERS Seminar as usual; however, due to ongoing restrictions associated with COVID19 an online format was once again chosen, with the experience of hosting the previous meeting online making for a smoother and more involved process.

Attendees from Cerberus Nuclear, ARC, Atkins, Aurora, BAE Systems, Cavendish Nuclear, Davis & Musgrove, EDF, Edvance UK, INS, Jacobs, Magnox Ltd, Mott MacDonald, NNL, ONR, Orano, PHE, Rolls-Royce, RPS, Sellafield Ltd, SRP, STFC, Tokamak Energy, TUV SUD and UKAEA were there and the meeting was very well received by all participants.

Learning from the previous meeting was taken onboard and the opportunity was taken to break participants out into smaller groups to discuss topics of interest. Answers from these groups were obtained and collated using the online collaboration tool Menti, which allowed word clouds to be generated of the results. This was considered to be a very successful exercise by all concerned.

“Once again, a big thank you to all attendees of TSF47, online engagement from members was up even from the last meeting, which itself far exceeded expectations. Therefore, we would like to thank everyone for their contributions during the meeting, particularly during the breakout sessions and to those who provided technical presentations for the meeting.”

Daniel Cork (TSF Chair)

One of the best received technical presentations was given by Cerberus’ own Peter Evans. The presentation was on Eddy, a program (freely available on GitHub either as an EXE or as source code) that Pete has written that takes MCNP outputs and processes them into a much more user-friendly HTML format. Significant interest was shown in the program from participants who use MCNP as their primary or cross-check shielding code and Pete fielded numerous questions on the current and planned capabilities of the program.

The next TSF members meeting (TSF48) is currently due to be held in May 2021 at the ANSWERS Seminar, COVID19 allowing. Further details will be found closer to the event at https://www.shieldingforum.com/.