The Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC) collects, analyzes, maintains, and distributes computer software and data sets in the areas of radiation transport and safety. The RSICC is operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The primary sponsors of the RSICC are the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The center began as the Radiation Shielding Information Center (RSIC) in 1962, but was renamed to RSICC in August 1996 to better reflect the scope of computer code technology at the center (i.e., radiation transport and safety).
The RSICC staff maintain an online software catalog at their website, which site visitors may browse (though no search functionality is provided). The software in the catalog cover a broad range of nuclear computational tools, providing in-depth coverage of radiation transport and safety topics for nuclear science and engineering, in support of modeling and simulation. Registered users may request software from the repository. With a few specific exceptions, a "cost recovery fee" is required to recoup the cost associated with RSICC operations before software requests are fulfilled.
The European counterpart to the RSICC is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Data Bank.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a federally funded research and development center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1943, the laboratory is now sponsored by the United States Department of Energy and administered by UT–Battelle, LLC.
Nuclear fallout is the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast, so called because it "falls out" of the sky after the explosion and the shock wave has passed. It commonly refers to the radioactive dust and ash created when a nuclear weapon explodes. The amount and spread of fallout is a product of the size of the weapon and the altitude at which it is detonated. Fallout may get entrained with the products of a pyrocumulus cloud and fall as black rain. This radioactive dust, usually consisting of fission products mixed with bystanding atoms that are neutron-activated by exposure, is a form of radioactive contamination.
Argonne National Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center in Lemont, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1946, the laboratory is owned by the United States Department of Energy and administered by UChicago Argonne LLC of the University of Chicago. The facility is the largest national laboratory in the Midwest.
The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) is an intergovernmental agency that is organized under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Originally formed on 1 February 1958 with the name European Nuclear Energy Agency (ENEA)—the United States participated as an Associate Member—the name was changed on 20 April 1972 to its current name after Japan became a member.
Neutron transport is the study of the motions and interactions of neutrons with materials. Nuclear scientists and engineers often need to know where neutrons are in an apparatus, in what direction they are going, and how quickly they are moving. It is commonly used to determine the behavior of nuclear reactor cores and experimental or industrial neutron beams. Neutron transport is a type of radiative transport.
The Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) is a 400 MW thermal, liquid sodium cooled, nuclear test reactor owned by the U.S. Department of Energy. It does not generate electricity. It is situated in the 400 Area of the Hanford Site, which is located in the state of Washington.
Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport (MCNP) is a general-purpose, continuous-energy, generalized-geometry, time-dependent, Monte Carlo radiation transport code designed to track many particle types over broad ranges of energies and is developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory. Specific areas of application include, but are not limited to, radiation protection and dosimetry, radiation shielding, radiography, medical physics, nuclear criticality safety, detector design and analysis, nuclear oil well logging, accelerator target design, fission and fusion reactor design, decontamination and decommissioning. The code treats an arbitrary three-dimensional configuration of materials in geometric cells bounded by first- and second-degree surfaces and fourth-degree elliptical tori.
Nuclear data represents measured probabilities of various physical interactions involving the nuclei of atoms. It is used to understand the nature of such interactions by providing the fundamental input to many models and simulations, such as fission and fusion reactor calculations, shielding and radiation protection calculations, criticality safety, nuclear weapons, nuclear physics research, medical radiotherapy, radioisotope therapy and diagnostics, particle accelerator design and operations, geological and environmental work, radioactive waste disposal calculations, and space travel calculations.
Nuclear decommissioning is the process leading to the irreversible complete or partial closure of a nuclear facility, usually a nuclear reactor, with the ultimate aim at termination of the operating licence. The process usually runs according to a decommissioning plan, including the whole or partial dismantling and decontamination of the facility, ideally resulting in restoration of the environment up to greenfield status. The decommissioning plan is fulfilled when the approved end state of the facility has been reached.
R4 nuclear reactor was a nuclear reactor built at Marviken, Vikbolandet and the fourth nuclear reactor built in Sweden. It was heavy water moderated and intended for the dual role of 130 MWe of power generation as well as plutonium production. It had a central role in the Swedish nuclear weapon programme. During the mid 1960s, the social democratic government officially abandoned the project of designing Swedish nuclear weapons and the Marviken plant became derelict. It was never loaded with fuel, and the project was cancelled in 1970.
The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) Leadership Computing Facility that houses the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a DOE Office of Science User Facility charged with helping researchers solve challenging scientific problems of global interest with a combination of leading high-performance computing (HPC) resources and international expertise in scientific computing.
The Air Force Safety Center is a field operating agency with headquarters at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, United States.
Nuclear energy is used in Slovenia for a number of civilian purposes including electricity production, medicine, and research.
Computational human phantoms are models of the human body used in computerized analysis. Since the 1960s, the radiological science community has developed and applied these models for ionizing radiation dosimetry studies. These models have become increasingly accurate with respect to the internal structure of the human body.
FASTRAD is a tool dedicated to the calculation of radiation effects on electronics. The software has uses in high energy physics and nuclear experiments, medical areas, and accelerator and space physics studies, though it is primarily used in the design of satellites.
Titan or OLCF-3 was a supercomputer built by Cray at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for use in a variety of science projects. Titan was an upgrade of Jaguar, a previous supercomputer at Oak Ridge, that uses graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to conventional central processing units (CPUs). Titan was the first such hybrid to perform over 10 petaFLOPS. The upgrade began in October 2011, commenced stability testing in October 2012 and it became available to researchers in early 2013. The initial cost of the upgrade was US$60 million, funded primarily by the United States Department of Energy.
Consortium for the Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors (CASL) is an Energy Innovation Hub sponsored by United States Department of Energy (DOE) and based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). CASL combines fundamental research and technology development through an integrated partnership of government, academia, and industry that extends across the nuclear energy enterprise. The goal of CASL is to develop advanced computational models of light water reactors (LWRs) that can be used by utilities, fuel vendors, universities, and national laboratories to help improve the performance of existing and future nuclear reactors. CASL was created in May 2010, and was the first energy innovation hub to be awarded.
The Multiprogram Research Facility is a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It is used by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to design and build supercomputers for cryptanalysis and other classified projects. It houses the classified component program of the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Nicholas Monroe Smith Jr. was a nuclear physicist and research consultant. Smith was an expert on reactor physics, a developer of operations research/computer modeling, and a computer applications consultant. He had ties to the Manhattan Project at Chicago and Oak Ridge, and worked with Samuel Allison and James Van Allen. Smith was a pioneer in the field of operations research.