Speaker
Description
The management of the Shielding Integral Benchmark Archive Database (SINBAD) is now maintained by a devoted Task Force under the auspice of the OECD NEA Expert Group on Physics of Reactor Systems (EGPRS). This new SINBAD Task Force (TF) was mandated in February 2021 and established in Q1 2022 to oversee the future development of SINBAD, which is consistent with the strategy of the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) to continuously improve data available from the Data Bank. The TF consist of shielding experts, experimentalists, and benchmark evaluators from the EGPRS and other invited experts and is to operate on a three-year renewable mandate.
The proposed aim of the TF is to maintain and initiate the process of modernizing SINBAD benchmark entries. There are two major factors that led to the EGPRS establishing the TF. First, the international community recognizes that the rate of SINBAD development does not match the importance of the shielding benchmark topic. The TF will reinvigorate benchmark creation with a sustainable target of 3-4 new evaluations per year. The second motivating factor is to modernize the database while building upon previous work, which includes all entries currently in SINBAD and quality reviews provided over the years by several SINBAD evaluators. In this modernization effort the TF will operate like a technical review group and will strive to achieve a similar level of quality as the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP) and the International Reactor Physics Experiment (IRPhE) Project. The EGPRS and the TF members have defined several goals for the TF, which include: avoid loss or removal of any existing information from the database, involve the nuclear data community and other user communities, include additional supplemental data (e.g. CAD files, simulation code inputs and outputs), and produce a single, peer-reviewed and approved summary document for each evaluation that follows the SINBAD evaluation guide approved by the Expert Group. The SINBAD database is now maintained in a GitLab environment hosted by the NEA, which ensures complete traceability of its update cycles.
There are a few conditions for reporting and operating that the EGPRS has specified for the TF. Otherwise, the TF has the freedom to define an optimum update process for SINBAD. The TF is required to report their progress each year at the annual EGPRS meeting. The EGPRS allotted a three-year period for the TF, which started in March 2021 and will end in March 2024. After those three years the EGPRS will review the progress of the TF and decide if it will be renewed.
If you or your colleagues have interest in participating in the SINBAD TF, please contact the authors of this paper.