The International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP), originally initiated at the national level by the US Department of Energy in 1992, became an official activity of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) in 1995.
This handbook contains criticality safety benchmark specifications that have been derived from experiments performed at various critical facilities around the world. The benchmark specifications are intended for use by criticality safety engineers to validate calculation techniques used to establish minimum subcritical margins for operations with fissile material and to determine criticality alarm requirement and placement. Many of the specifications are also useful for nuclear data testing. Example calculations are presented; these calculations do not, however, constitute a validation of the codes or cross-section data.
The evaluated criticality safety benchmark data are presented in nine volumes, containing over 65 000 pages and 549 evaluations with benchmark specifications for over 4 700 critical, near-critical or subcritical configurations, 24 criticality alarm placement/shielding configurations with multiple dose points for each, and 200 configurations that have been categorised as fundamental physics measurements that are relevant to criticality safety applications.
New to the handbook are benchmark specifications for the Water-moderated Square-pitched U(6.90)O2 Fuel Rod Lattices with 0.67 Fuel-to-water Ratio experiments (see front cover) that were performed by a team of experimenters at Sandia National Laboratories between 2009 and 2012.