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/.

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.

46th Shielding Forum Meeting

Cerberus Nuclear hosted the 46th Shielding Forum meeting online this week. An online format was chosen due to the recent travel and meeting restrictions due to the COVID19 outbreak.

Attendees from EDF Energy, Edvance, BAES, Cavendish Nuclear, Orano Projects, Kinectrics, UKAEA, Rolls Royce, Jacobs, SRP and ONR were there and the meeting spanned several different countries including United States, Canada and France.

Daniel Cork (TSF Chair)

A big thank you to all attendees of TSF46, online engagement from members far exceeded expectations and we would just like to thank everyone for their contributions during the meeting."

One of the key topic discussed was the proposed 2021 Shielding Awareness Course in which Cerberus Nuclear will be playing a key role. The course will be a collaboration between TSF and the Society of Radiological Protection (SRP).

The next TSF members meeting is currently due to be held in November 2020 at the ANSWERS Seminar. Further details will be found closer to the event at https://www.shieldingforum.com/

University of Liverpool - Shielding Design Process Lecture

The Shielding Forum (TSF) has provided support for the Radiation Shielding Module of the NTEC course for many years providing an industry-focused knowledge input to the radiation shielding module.

Several TSF member organisations provide lectures on a wide range of subjects from Monte Carlo and deterministic codes as well as practical radiation shielding applications.

Cerberus Nuclear is a key member of TSF and provides a student lecture on the Shielding Design Process our talk focuses on how this high-level process is used in industry to support facility design.

https://www.shieldingforum.com/

24th MCNEG Meeting (MCNEG 2020)

Cerberus Nuclear's Geoff Hall recently presented at the 24th MCNEG meeting held at the Culham Conference Centre, Oxfordshire.

MCNEG provides a forum for new and experienced users of Monte Carlo software for radiation transport.

Geoff's presentation was based on the assessment of transient dose rates from transport packages and gamma monitor normalisation. The talk was received really well with some very good follow-up questions.

It was a well attended event and there were some really good talks, the tour of the JET reactor on day 2 was excellent!
Geoff Hall

Cerberus Nuclear would like to thank AWE and UKAEA for supporting the event.

http://www.mcneg.org.uk/