Investigation and Simulation of Gamma-Neutron Shielding for Nuclear- Pumped Lasers

Nuclear-pumped lasers (NPL) are lasers that excite the active laser environment caused by nuclear reaction. Such lasers need ionizing radiation shielding for mixed neutron and gamma fields. In this work, a shielding system for NPL was designed which using 10B(n,α)7Li. In this simulation, we have used MCNPX 2.6.0 Monte Carlo code and the thermal neutron flux as 1×1016 n.cm-2.s-1 for excitation reaction. Such a large neutron flux can be obtained from a reactor source or a heavy ion accelerator. For this work, 10B fuel is covered on the surface of a rectangular cube aluminum shell by using the Monte Carlo method. In the design of the shielding, combinations with different materials have been used with various arrangements in three layers. According to the simulation, the arrangement of Fe2-B-BPE-Pb is a suitable protection compound for such lasers.