State Atomic Energy Corporation "Rosatom"
State Scientific Center of the Russian Federation
Institute of Physics and Power Engineering
named after A.I.Leypunsky

ENCYCLOPAEDIA
OF THE NEUTRON DATA
RUSFOND
(RUSsian File
Of evaluated Neutron Data)

In 2005 Russian Ministry of Education and Science conclude the agreement with IPPE on the work "Creating of national library of neutron data". This agreement was concluded on the basis of decision of tender committee that selected this work among many others presented for the priority direction "Energetics and energy economy" – lot EE.12.1/001.

In 2008 the RUSFOND library was made available on the Internet site http://www.ippe.ru/podr/abbn/libr/rosfond.php along with the request to sent comments to the email address abbn@ippe.ru. During the year a lot of comments reporting many technical errors made during library formation were received. The authors also have discovered some defects while converting the data to the format suitable for neutron fields calculations. In the library presented these errors were removed. All changes are listed in the section "Additions and Corrections".

The RUSFOND library contains evaluated neutron data for all stable and long-lived (with half-life greater than 1 day) nuclei. There are 679 such nuclei. In addition the RUSFOND library includes data for seven short-lived nuclei with capture or fission cross-sections high enough to transmute during they short life time when being exposed to high flux of thermal neutrons. The typical example is ¹³⁵Xe with half-life of just 9.1 hour but with thermal neutron capture cross-section so high that in power thermal reactor it manages to absorb the neutron and thus to slow down the chain reaction.

The library also contains scattering data for nuclei bounded in molecules or crystals – 20 materials in total.

The creation of new original evaluations for all nuclei considered was not in goals of this work; that would require several decades of work of much bigger scientific group. The problem was to select the most reliable data from modern national libraries and to justify this selection. Data of the following libraries were mainly considered – American ENDF/B-VI and ENDF/B-VII, Japanese JENDL-3.3, West-European JEFF-3.1 (it also includes activation library EAF-2003) and Russian libraries BROND-2 (and -3) and FOND-2.2.

The results of the work are divided in three parts:

The RUSFOND library in the ENDF/B-6 text format;

Justifications of file selection – in the pdf format;

Translation of the ENDF-6 format description in Russian – also in the pdf format

The whole editorship of the RUSFOND documentation was provided by M.N.Nikolaev. Algorithmic verification of the evaluated data files was performed by V.N.Koscheev by converting them into forms suitable for using in the calculation codes (299-group ABBN format, ACE format for MCNP). Please send all reports of new errors found in RUSFOND data files, doubts in their justifications, results of using RUSFOND data in calculations, and other comments to abbn@ippe.ru .