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Home / Publications / Journals / Nuclear Technology / Volume 192 / Number 3

Enhancements to the MCNP6 Background Source

Garrett E. McMath, Gregg W. McKinney

Nuclear Technology / Volume 192 / Number 3 / December 2015 / Pages 232-239

Technical Paper / Radiation Transport and Protection / dx.doi.org/10.13182/NT14-134

First Online Publication:October 19, 2015
Updated:December 2, 2015

The particle transport code MCNP has been used to produce a background radiation data file on a worldwide grid that can easily be sampled as a source in the code. Location-dependent cosmic showers were modeled by Monte Carlo methods to produce the resulting neutron and photon background flux at 2054 locations around Earth. An improved galactic-cosmic-ray feature was used to model the source term as well as data from multiple sources to model the transport environment through atmosphere, soil, and seawater. A new elevation scaling feature was also added to the code to increase the accuracy of the cosmic neutron background for user locations with off-grid elevations. Benchmarking has shown the neutron integral flux values to be within experimental error.