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.
If you are not a licensed user of SCALE and would like to order the software, please visit: https://www.ornl.gov/content/how-order-scale. Although attendance of the workshop general sessions does not require a SCALE license, participants who would like to attend the hands-on tutorials need to have a SCALE 6.2 or a SCALE-6.3beta license by the time the workshop starts. Please request the software at least two months prior to the start of the workshop.
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, radiation shielding, reactor physics, spent fuel characterization, and sensitivity and uncertainty analysis.
SCALE 6.2, released in 2016, is the culmination of a 5-year $20 million investment. In this work, the SCALE team looked holistically at all aspects of the code system, ranging from the fundamental nuclear data to the interactive user interfaces. For the first time in SCALE’s 40-year development history, the internal workings of the computational sequences and the fundamental binary data formats were reworked. The success of this major initiative depended on the creation of an 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 wide variety of innovative features. Some highlights include the Polaris tool for simple and efficient light water reactor lattice physics analysis, the Sampler tool for stochastic uncertainty quantification, the ORIGAMI tool for 2D and 3D spent fuel source term generation, parallel computing capabilities in the KENO Monte Carlo transport codes, and greatly enhanced continuous energy (CE) Monte Carlo features for criticality safety, radiation shielding, sensitivity/uncertainty analysis, and depletion, all with user-specified temperature corrections generated at runtime. SCALE 6.2 also includes the AMPX tools to generate multigroup and CE cross section libraries, the first release of AMPX since 1992. In addition to integrating these innovative features, a deep review was performed on many existing features to improve their accuracy, efficiency, and usability.
