Development of shutdown dose rate calculation code based on cosRMC and application to benchmark analysis

Abstract Accurate estimation of shutdown dose rate (SDR) has important reference significance for the design, operation and maintenance of fusion devices. In order to obtain the decay gamma source distribution with higher spatial resolution, a shutdown dose rate calculation code was developed based on the Rigorous two-step (R2S) method. The Monte Carlo code cosRMC and the radioactivity inventory code ALARA were coupled to calculate SDR in complex geometry based on mesh-tally. The ray tracking method was used to obtain the voxel-averaged nuclide density, and a decay photon sampling module was developed to accurately describe the distribution of the activation source. In order to improve the computational efficiency in deep penetration problems, the global variance reduction technique based on iterative weight window was adopted. The developed code was firstly verified with rectangular parallelepiped model consists of steel and water, in which the effect of bremsstrahlung photon was also discussed. Then the code was applied to the calculation and analysis of the ITER port plug benchmark, by comparing with other SDR calculation codes. The influence of different activation libraries on the decay gamma spectra and the effect of mesh resolution on the calculation accuracy were investigated. The results showed that the SDR function in cosRMC code is able to calculate SDR accurately with high spatial resolution for deep penetration problems.