2025 SCALE USERS’ GROUP WORKSHOP
WHEN
June 2-6, 2025
WHERE
Virtually from Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Registration is now open. Please register at: https://events.ornl.gov/scalemeetings2025/
Event Details
The workshop will provide a highly interactive forum for a fruitful exchange between SCALE users and developers and will include a mix of presentations, open discussions, and tutorial sessions. End users are invited to participate in the meeting and contribute with presentations on impactful and innovative applications of SCALE.
Attendance of the workshop does not require a SCALE license, but registration will be required. Participants who would like to attend the hands-on tutorials must have a SCALE 6.2 or SCALE 6.3 license by the time the workshop starts. If you are not a licensed user of SCALE and would like to request a license for this software, please visit: https://www.ornl.gov/content/how-order-scale.
SCALE
The SCALE code system is a widely used modeling and simulation suite for nuclear safety analysis and design that is developed and maintained by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. SCALE provides a comprehensive, verified and validated, user-friendly tool set for criticality safety, reactor physics, radiation shielding, spent fuel characterization, and sensitivity and uncertainty analysis.
SCALE 6.3, released in 2023, continued the previous efforts of the SCALE team for improvements and modernization, by looking holistically at all aspects of the code system, ranging from the fundamental nuclear data to the interactive user interfaces. These improvements benefited from enhancements in the automated development and testing system, in which the impacts on trusted results from the massive internal updates to all aspects of the code could be quantified on an hourly basis on all supported platforms.
Having a sound testing infrastructure and modernized foundational components to improve efficiency and minimize redundancy enabled the team to introduce a variety of innovative features. Selected highlights include: new sensitivity metrics for understanding nuclear data impacts, ability to calculate correlation coefficients between arbitrary outputs and analyze uncertainty due to delayed neutron data with the Sampler tool for uncertainty quantification; new 3D geometry and tally visualization capabilities in SCALE’s Fulcrum GUI, including results overlay capability; a new tool, VADER, derived from the legacy USLSTATS, for determining bias and bias uncertainty for criticality safety computational methods, which was completely integrated under Fulcrum; ability to use the Shift Monte Carlo code for neutron and gamma transport under CSAS for criticality safety analysis, MAVRIC for shielding analysis, and TRITON for depletion simulation; a modernized library construction integrated into the ORIGEN sequence instead of external use of the COUPLE, and a new sensitivity capability in ORIGEN; new multigroup libraries for fast-spectrum and thermal-spectrum systems, inclusion of additional ENDF/B-VIII.0 data resources, and refreshed ORIGEN reactor libraries to cover higher burnups and higher enrichments. In addition to integrating these innovative features, a deep review was performed on many existing features to improve their accuracy, efficiency, and usability.
