ENHANCEMENTS IN SCALE 6.1

The SCALE code system developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory provides a comprehensive, verified and validated, user-friendly tool set for criticality safety, reactor physics, radiation shielding, and sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. For more than 30 years, regulators, licensees, and research institutions around the world have used SCALE for nuclear safety analysis and design. SCALE provides a 'plug-and-play' framework with 89 computational modules, including three deterministic and three Monte Carlo radiation transport solvers that are selected based on the desired solution. SCALE's graphical user interfaces assist with accurate system modeling, visualization, and convenient access to desired results. SCALE 6.1 builds on the existing capabilities and ease-of-use of SCALE and provides several new features such as enhanced lattice physics capabilities and multigroup Monte Carlo depletion, improved options and capabilities for sensitivity and uncertainty analysis calculations, improved flexibility in shielding and criticality accident alarm system calculations with automated variance reduction, and new options for the definition of group structures for depletion calculations. The SCALE 6.1 development team has focused on improved robustness via substantial additional regression testing and verification for new and existing features, providing improved performance relative to SCALE 6.0, especially in reactor physics calculations and in the nuclear data used formore » source term characterization and shielding calculations.« less