Generalized Nuclear Data: A New Structure (with Supporting Infrastructure) for Handling Nuclear Data

Journal Article · Sat Dec 15 00:00:00 EST 2012 · Nuclear Data Sheets

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/J.NDS.2012.11.008· OSTI ID:22131272

Mattoon, C. M. ^[1]; Beck, B. R.; Patel, N. R.; Summers, N. C.; Hedstrom, G. W. ^[1]; Brown, D. A. ^[2]

---

1. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore CA (United States)
2. National Nuclear Data Center, Upton NY (United States)

The Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) format was designed in the 1960s to accommodate neutron reaction data to support nuclear engineering applications in power, national security and criticality safety. Over the years, the scope of the format has been extended to handle many other kinds of data including charged particle, decay, atomic, photo-nuclear and thermal neutron scattering. Although ENDF has wide acceptance and support for many data types, its limited support for correlated particle emission, limited numeric precision, and general lack of extensibility mean that the nuclear data community cannot take advantage of many emerging opportunities. More generally, the ENDF format provides an unfriendly environment that makes it difficult for new data evaluators and users to create and access nuclear data. The Cross Section Evaluation Working Group (CSEWG) has begun the design of a new Generalized Nuclear Data (or 'GND') structure, meant to replace older formats with a hierarchy that mirrors the underlying physics, and is aligned with modern coding and database practices. In support of this new structure, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has updated its nuclear data/reactions management package Fudge to handle GND structured nuclear data. Fudge provides tools for converting both the latest ENDF format (ENDF-6) and the LLNL Evaluated Nuclear Data Library (ENDL) format to and from GND, as well as for visualizing, modifying and processing (i.e., converting evaluated nuclear data into a form more suitable to transport codes) GND structured nuclear data. GND defines the structure needed for storing nuclear data evaluations and the type of data that needs to be stored. But unlike ENDF and ENDL, GND does not define how the data are to be stored in a file. Currently, Fudge writes the structured GND data to a file using the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), as it is ASCII based and can be viewed with any text editor. XML is a meta-language, meaning that it has a primitive set of definitions for representing hierarchical data/text in a file. Other meta-languages, like HDF5 which stores the data in binary form, can also be used to store GND in a file. In this paper, we will present an overview of the new GND data structures along with associated tools in Fudge.

• OSTI ID: 22131272
• Journal Information: Nuclear Data Sheets, Vol. 113, Issue 12; Other Information: Copyright (c) 2012 Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, All rights reserved.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0090-3752
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS
ACCURACY
CHARGED PARTICLES
CROSS SECTIONS
DATA BASE MANAGEMENT
DATA PROCESSING
EVALUATION
LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY
NEUTRON REACTIONS
NUCLEAR DATA COLLECTIONS
NUCLEAR DECAY
NUCLEAR ENGINEERING
PHOTONUCLEAR REACTIONS
THERMAL NEUTRONS