What Are They For?



The uses of the ENDF formats have also evolved over the years. The first few versions were largely intended for thermal-reactor applications. ENDF/B-IV and ENDF/B-V shifted the emphasis toward fast-reactor and fusion applications. For ENDF/B-VI, additional extensions have been made for charged-particle and accelerator applications. In recent years, the ENDF system has also gained a role as a mode of publication and archiving of basic low-energy nuclear physics data. In general,
  • ENDF-format libraries are computer-readable files of nuclear data that describe nuclear reaction cross sections, the distributions in energy and angle of reaction products, the various nuclei produced during nuclear reactions, the decay modes and product spectra resulting from the decay of radioactive nuclei, and the estimated errors in these quantities.

  • ENDF-format libraries are intended to be used for a wide variety of applications that require calculations of the transport of neutrons, photons, and charged-particles through materials, the enumeration of the interactions of this radiation with the materials and their surroundings, and the time evolution of the radioactivity associated with the nuclear processes.

Examples of uses for ENDF-based libraries include fission and fusion reactor calculations, shielding and radiation protection calculations, criticality safety, nuclear weapons, nuclear physics research, medical radiotherapy, radioisotope therapy and diagnostics, accelerator design and operations, geological and environmental work, radioactive waste disposal calculations, and space travel calculations.

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15 December 2012 T-2 Nuclear Information Service ryxm@lanl.gov