A History of Dosimetry for the Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors

Abstract

This paper presents a summary of the methods used in the first ∼40 years of AGR neutron dosimetry and nuclear heating calculations, and the influence of the earlier Magnox reactor dosimetry programme. While the current state-of-the-art Monte Carlo methods are extremely powerful they still require very careful consideration of the quality of the input data, nuclear data validation and variance reduction techniques; in particular, this paper examines the difficulties in assuring the adequate convergence of calculations when Monte Carlo acceleration is applied in the presence of significant streaming paths through attenuating or scattering media.