All,
I am trying to determine the shielding required to bring the dose rate on the surface of my reactor monolith down to acceptable dose rates (32 nSv/s, or 1 mSv/year). I am simulating a 5 MWth reactor design with tungsten carbide shielding. However, despite significant shielding (45 cm of tungsten carbide) I am still getting very high doses on the surface - 7.2 x 10^6 nSv per second.
I used the following examples as guidance:
I have attached my code below as well. In essence, I turned on photon transport, set up a current tally with the surface mesh of the outer shielding, set up an energy filter with the openmc.data.dose_coefficients, divided by the surface area, and normalized the data according to the procedure for k-eigenvalue simulations. Again, the full geometry and procedure is in the code, which I tried to comment and make as readable as possible.
I find it strange that even after 45 cm of tungsten carbide there is still significant dosage of photons - 7.2 x 10^6 nSv per second - this seems high to me. However, I may be wrong, so I was interested if someone could give me a sanity check on this. I want to make sure my code is structured properly.
parametric_keff.py (35.0 KB)
Thank you all in advance!