Dr. Ion Stamatelatos Ion Stamatelatos is research director at the Fusion Technology Group, Institute of Nuclear and Radiological Sciences, Energy, Technology & Safety, NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece. His research interests include non-destructive testing, development and applications of nuclear analytical techniques, radiation protection and safety, in vivo body composition studies, interactions of radiation with matter, radiation detection and measurements. His current work focuses on mission oriented research in the EUROfusion program aiming on neutron streaming calculations and measurements along long ducts and labyrinths at JET for the verification of the neutronics tools used for ITER design, as well as on performing studies on the radiological properties and data evaluation of real ITER materials. Ion Stamatelatos holds a PhD in applied nuclear science from the University of Birmingham, UK (1991), MSc in medical physics from the University of Aberdeen, UK (1984), and BSc in Physics from the University of Patras, Greece (1982). He has authored about 40 publications in international peer reviewed journals and more than 40 presentations in international scientific conferences
Radiation shielding design is a mature technological discipline. The main advances in the discipline are made in computational resources as well as on information on cross sections and material properties. Radiation transport computations are mainly performed using deterministic (discrete ordinates) and Monte Carlo techniques. Deterministic methods produce detailed, system-wide solutions and are computationally efficient. However, deterministic methods may introduce uncertainties associated with the discrete treatment of the independent variables (space, energy and angle) of the transport equation and can admit solutions that exhibit systematic mistakes. This is especially the case in shielding applications. On the other hand, the Monte Carlo method enables detailed, explicit geometric, energy, and angular representations and hence is considered the most accurate method available for solving complex radiation transport problems for shielding design. Monte Carlo codes (such as MCNP, FLUKA, GEANT, EGS, etc) including improved physics models, cross-section data, variance reduction methods, detailed source and tallies representation capabilities enabled the solution of complex radiation shielding problems. Such problems include radiation transport through ducts and labyrinths in the shielding walls and structures, treatment of the scattered components of the primary radiation as well as taking into consideration the production of secondary radiation. Despite substantial advancements in computational hardware performance the computer time required for analog Monte Carlo is still considered high for the design and analysis of many deep penetration shielding problems. For this purpose, hybrid methods were introduced for increasing the efficiency of shielding simulations. The hybrid methods use approximate forward and/or adjoint fluxes from fast deterministic transport calculations to generate variance reduction parameters for accelerating the Monte Carlo simulations.
In this presentation a review on the recent advances in computation methods for shielding design will be provided.