A multi-code,multi-physics approach investigating the impact of vegetation on prompt gamma-ray energy deposition

Abstract

During the age of above-ground nuclear weapons testing, the effect of vegetation on radiation energy deposition in soil was computationally too challenging to study. Today, improvements in high-performance computing, mature and accurate radiation transport models, and user-friendly optimization and statistical analysis software packages enable investigations into modeling and quantifying the impact of forest vegetation on the prompt gamma-ray energy deposition within the soil from an atmospheric nuclear weapon detonation. Our approach simulates radiation transport, amasses results, and statistically analyzes the results using CUBIT^®, Dakota, and MCNP^® to perform meshing, geometry creation, and radiation transport. Depending on the forest parameters, there is 0.16% --1.3% change in photon energy deposition in the soil. This research successfully demonstrates a methodology for streamlining a complex radiation modeling effort across multiple codes to quantify and answer a nuclear weapons effects question.