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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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