The UK Shielding Forum (TSF) has provided support for the Radiation Shielding Module of the University of Liverpool’s 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 to practical radiation shielding applications.

Cerberus Nuclear is 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 supporting facility design.

This year, due to the restrictions of Covid-19, our own Geoff Hall pre-recorded the lecture, which was shown to students and very well received. This was then followed up the next day by a live Q&A session where students were tasked to think about the practicalities of defining a shielding design basis and performing shielding calculations based on that design basis for a realistic scenario. They were then given the chance to ask general questions about the subjects covered in the lecture.

The live session was well attended by students, who engaged with the exercise and asked a variety of pertinent questions both about the exercise and the lecture itself. Indeed, the session proved so popular that it ran an additional 30 minutes until the start of the next session!

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/.

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/