New Starter - Katrina Christaki

We're pleased to announce that Katrina has recently joined Cerberus Nuclear as a graduate criticality safety assessor. She is looking to build on her academic experience from the University of Birmingham’s Physics and Technology of Nuclear Reactors (PTNR) course and student placement with EDF Energy’s Fuel Route Systems Team. Through these university courses, Katrina has experience using both MONK and MCNP.

Alongside her consultancy roles, Katrina is undertaking structured training sessions in-line with the Working Party on Criticality (WPC) Competency Framework delivered by experienced criticality safety assessors within Cerberus Nuclear.

EMI Scheme for Cerberus Nuclear

We are delighted to announce that, as an addition to our industry leading remuneration package, we have offered our staff share options in the company. This means that over the next few years we will welcome our talented team into the fold as shareholders.

"An EMI scheme allows us to recognise and reward the vital role our team has played in the company's early success, whilst ensuring continuity as the company continues to grow"

Stewart Hay (Director)

The scheme itself is an Enterprise Management Incentive (EMI) and has been administered by Jerry and Kirsty at the Mill Consultancy who have done a fantastic job in walking us through the process; they are highly recommended!

(Photos from the last time the whole company was together - December 2019!)

WPC Meeting - November 2020

Cerberus Nuclear attended the second Working Party on Criticality (WPC) meeting of the year, and the second to take place as a web-conference.

This was the first meeting since Toby Tyas was confirmed as our new representative, alongside Stewart Hay. We presented Eddy, our new open source HTML output generator for MCNP and SCALE. Toby discussed our recent funding application to the Alpha Resilience Capability (ARC) Programme, in support of the development of CARTA, and continued his contribution to the ‘Handbooks’ sub-group.

We’re looking forward to a point in time when the meetings can take place in person again, but thank you to Springfields Fuels Limited (Westinghouse Electric Company) for hosting the virtual event.

47th Shielding Forum Meeting

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/.

Eddy - MCNP & SCALE Html Generator

Cerberus Nuclear has created Eddy, an open-source Html output generator for MCNP and SCALE. The function of Eddy is to parse MCNP and SCALE output files into an easy-to-read and user-friendly format. Eddy has been written to work for both radiation transport and criticality calculations.

Eddy collates key information from an output file so that it can be quickly reviewed. Normalisation factors can also be specified to simplify interpretation of tally outputs.

Eddy Html outputs include:
Normalised Tally Results with Error
Highlighted Statistical Checks
K-effective and Error
Comments and Warnings
Cell Mass and Volumes
Particle Populations
Full MCNP Input

Eddy is simple to use from the command line or via its built-in interface. Hyperlinks within the Html enable the user to navigate to the required part of the output with ease.

The Html output from Eddy assists in the preparation of technical reports supports QA processes and improves workflow efficiency. The contained nature of the Html output and its small file size also facilitates the sharing of calculation outputs for independent review purposes.

Eddy is freely available and can be downloaded as an executable from here

If you would like to provide any feedback or would like to request additional features please get in touch by emailing nuclear@cerberusnuclear.com

RWM Criticality Safety Framework

We are really pleased to announce that Cerberus Nuclear and Galson Sciences Limited have teamed up to support Radioactive Waste Management (RWM) on their Criticality Safety Framework. We believe our combined criticality teams offer RWM a really strong capability, with a blend of operational criticality safety experience and unique repository operational expertise. We are looking forward to working on a wide range of tasks during this exciting time for GDF development in the UK.

Illustrative Geological Disposal Facility used under Open Government Licence v3.0.

New Starter - Kimberley Bird

Kimberley has joined Cerberus Nuclear after working with us on a project to use deep learning and computer vision to identify defects on the surface of waste containers. Kimberley is a developer specialising in data science and she holds a Master’s degree in Advanced Computer Science. Kimberley has contributed to several successful machine learning and computer vision projects, both in her academic career and in industry. Her experience includes machine learning, medical imaging and bioinformatics, as well as natural language processing and front-end development.

Graduate Recruitment

Cerberus Nuclear are an small, dynamic consultancy specialising in the following areas:

Criticality Safety
Radiation Shielding
Nuclear Characterisation

Founded in 2016, we aim to do things differently to other consultancies. We offer industry leading services in our core areas, putting innovation and creativity at the heart of our work. We value employee satisfaction, offer genuine progression and investment in our team, and provide a friendly environment in which to learn and develop.

We are looking for technically minded individuals to train and develop across all of our areas of work.

We offer a competitive remuneration package, which includes:

A company bonus scheme up to 10% of base salary.
A company pension contribution of 10% of base salary.
25 days holiday increasing year on year to up to 30 days per year.
A growing range of benefits, including subscriptions to Perkbox and salary sacrifice schemes for bicycles and tech.

In addition, we offer the flexibility and autonomy that comes with working for a small, dynamic company. We offer our graduates early responsibility and the chance to learn and develop alongside a talented team of specialists.

If you would like to apply, or find out more, please send a CV and cover letter to nuclear@cerberusnuclear.com. We intend to offer roles to start from Autumn 2020.

NTEC Summer Student

This summer we are pleased to be supporting the University of Manchester and the Nuclear Technology Education Consortium (NTEC) by supervising an MSc summer project.

Three of the Cerberus Nuclear team have an MSc in Nuclear Science and Technology from NTEC; the course offers an ideal introduction to the nuclear industry and so it is great to be able to keep ties with the University.

The project itself is intended to support an expanded number of scenarios for our criticality training aid (CARTA). Work is being conducted 100% remotely due to the current COVID related working arrangements, which has been challenging, but the project is off to a promising start.

Return to the Office

We have rearranged our office to be in-line with social distancing guidelines.

With most of the team still working from home we decided to re-purpose the space into a fully featured virtual reality suite. This enables us to take a big leap forward in our capability and we should have some exciting news on this front in the coming weeks!

The picture shows Sam getting to grips with an analogue of a JCS gamma dose rate monitor.

A big thank you to John Caunt Scientific for allowing us to use the monitor.