Photonuclear Physics in Radiation Transport—II: Implementation

This is the second of two companion papers. The first paper describes model calculations and nuclear data evaluations of photonuclear reactions on isotopes of C, O, Al, Si, Ca, Fe, Cu, Ta, W, and Pb for incident photon energies up to 150 MeV. This paper describes the steps taken to process these files into transport libraries and to update the Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) and MCNPX radiation transport codes to use tabular photonuclear reaction data. The evaluated photonuclear data files are created in the standard evaluated nuclear data file (ENDF) format. These files must be processed by the NJOY data processing system into A Compact ENDF (ACE) files suitable for radiation transport calculations. MCNP and MCNPX have been modified to use these new data in a self-consistent and fully integrated manner. Verification problems were used at each step along the path to check the integrity of the methodology. The resulting methodology and tools provide a comprehensive system for using photonuclear data in radiation transport calculations. Also described are initial validation simulations used to benchmark several of the photonuclear transport tables.