Co-60 Source Shielding

October 2024 - December 2024

During my senior year at OSU, I had the pleasure of completing a radiation protection and shielding course with Dr. Kanlakunta and Dr. Denning. The final project for this course was to design an appropriate set of encapsulation and radiative shielding layers to surround a radioactive source, and to verify its effectiveness with a simulation in MNCP (a radiation transport simulator developed by Los Alamos). I was assigned team leader for this project and worked with three other students to design a highly optimized lead-concrete encapsulation system for a cylindrical Cobalt-60 source.

My major contribution to this project was in its software. First, I created an MCNP input deck to test a series of simplistic shield designs, and worked with my group members to develop a mathematical model that matched the output of these simulations. Once we had derived a set of equations that could accurately predict MCNP's output metrics for our shield designs, I created a Python script to analyze millions of possible shield configurations. This script varies the thickness and order of several material layers (all of which meet the specified radition attenuation requirements) and calculates the cost, mass, and volume of each design. Then, a custom efficiency metric is calculated based on these parameters, and used to determine the overall most effective encapsulation design.

The final report shown here is in an abriged format. MCNP is subject to US nuclear technology export controls, so its input decks are not included in this version of the report. The rest of the report is functionally unaltered, and the Python script is included in Appendix D.