Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) is the research branch of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and one of the UK's most prestigious research centres. CCFE's experience of fusion devices extends over 50 years. It presently has around 800 staff working on fusion and operates two tokamaks at Culham: JET (on behalf of EFDA, via the JET Operation Contract) and, as part of the EURATOM/CCFE Association programme, MAST.
The European Activation SYstem (EASY), developed and maintained at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, is an international standard for simulation of activation, transmutation processes caused by nuclear reactions and decay. It integrates information from data files and collaborators around the world into a single user-friendly package, which is invaluable for nuclear researchers and has wider applications for industry; nuclear fission and fusion, accelerator physics, isotope production, stockpile and fuel cycle stewardship, materials characterisation, life and storage cycle management.
Relevant experience
The European Activation SYstem EASY-II has been re-engineered and re-written in the modern f95 programming language so as to answer today's and tomorrow's needs in terms of activation, transmutation, depletion, burnup and inventory requirements. The FISPACT-II code development project has allowed to embed many more features in terms of energy range; up to GeV; incident particles, alpha, gamma, proton, deuteron, neutron; and neutron physics, self-shielding effects, temperature dependence and covariance so as to really cover all application needs: transport, shielding, inventory, medical, astrophysics. In parallel, the maturity of modern, truly general purpose libraries encompassing thousands of target isotopes such as TENDL, the evolution of the ENDF nuclear data format and the capabilities of the latest generation of processing codes PREPRO, NJOY and CALENDF have allowed the inventory code to be fed with more robust, complete and appropriate data forms: cross sections with covariance, probability tables in the resonance ranges, kerma, dpa, gas and radionuclides production and up to 23 decay types. All such data for the five most important incident particles (n, p, d, α and γ) are available in evaluated data files with information up to an incident energy of 200 MeV.
Role and main tasks
Within CHANDA, CCFE participates in coordination and dissemination cross-cutting activities. CCFE also will develop and demonstrate new nuclear data evaluations and capabilities.
Scientific and technical personnel involved
- Dr. Jean-Christophe Sublet: Responsible for covering the leadership and management of the work by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority on the provision and development of nuclear data transport and activation libraries and codes. Charts, develops and implements the necessary computational neutronics toolkits to help foster the developments of nuclear energy. Co-author of the FENDL, EAF and JEFF activation cross-sections libraries, the TENDL-2012 libraries, the activation codes FISPACT, FISPACT-II and processing code CALENDF. Jean-Christophe has over 100 publications, journals and conference contributions. He is a member of advisory boards of the IAEA, the IRSN and the UK IAEA/INDC representative.