Monte Carlo Simulation and Experimental Validation for Radiation Protection with Multiple Complex Source Terms and Deep Penetration for a Radioactive Liquid Waste Cementation Facility

Abstract

A new radioactive liquid waste cementation facility was under commissioning recently in the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology of Tsinghua University, which is designed to simultaneously process multiple intermediate-level radioactive waste drums. Therefore, the multiple volume sources and the scattering effect becomes a key issue in its radiation protection. For this purpose, the Monte Carlo program FLUKA code and experimental measurement were both adopted. In the FLUKA simulation, five different scenarios were considered, i.e., one drum, two drums, four drums, six drums, and eight drums. For the multiple volume sources, the source subroutine code of FLUKA was rewritten to realize the sampling. The complex shielding also leads to a deep penetration problem; hence, the optimization algorithm and variance reduction techniques were adopted. During the measurement, two scenarios, outdoor and indoor, were carried out separately representing the dose field when only one drum is considered and when the scattering effect is considered. A comparison between the experiments and calculations shows very good agreement. From both of the Monte Carlo simulation and the experimental measurement, it can be drawn that, in the horizontal direction, with the increase of the drum number, the dose rate increases very little, while in the vertical direction, the increase of the dose rate is very obvious with the increase of the drum number. The complicated source term sampling methods, the optimization algorithm and variance reduction techniques, and the experimental verification can provide valuable references for the similar scattering problem in radiation protection and shielding design.