Speaker
Description
The Generalised Nuclear Database Structure is a new standard for representing reaction and decay data in nuclear data libraries and is slated to replace the legacy ENDF-6 format. GNDS is designed to be both human readable and easy to work with so that downstream code developers can create software that supports GNDS. The specifications for GNDS-1.9 were published in 2020; this version describes the GNDS format used in the ENDF/B-VIII.0 library release. Work on GNDS-2.0 began soon after GNDS-1.9 was published with the focus on satisfying all of the requirements defined by WPEC Subgroup 38. In this contribution, we will detail the major changes in GNDS-2.0 including a new thermal neutron scattering markup that allows for mixed mode moderators, an expressive documentation format supporting rich meta data and improved support for covariance data, including thermal neutron scattering covariances. In addition, GNDS-2.0 improves and simplifies the resonance parameter descriptions, supports map-files (the GNDS equivalent of an ACE xsdir file), and provides a host of other smaller improvements. We will outline the timeline for finalizing GNDS-2.0 and the implementation status in processing codes.
This work was supported by the Nuclear Criticality Safety Program, funded and managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration for the Department of Energy. The work at Brookhaven National Laboratory was sponsored by the Office of Nuclear Physics, Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886 with Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC.