WPEC SG50: Developing an Automatically Readable, Comprehensive and Curated Experimental Nuclear Reaction Database

¹ Naval Nuclear Laboratory, Schenectady, NY, 12301-1072, USA
² Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, 87545, USA
³ International Atomic Energy Agency, A-1400 Vienna, Austria
⁴ Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6171, USA

^* e-mail: amanda.lewis@unnpp.gov
^** e-mail: dneudecker@lanl.gov

Published online: 26 May 2023

Abstract

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) Working Party on International Nuclear Data Evaluation Co-operation (WPEC) subgroup (SG) 50 was formed in 2020 to develop an automatically readable, comprehensive and curated experimental nuclear reaction database. This database is called MEDUSAL (Machine-readable Experimental Data User Application & Library), and will draw from EXFOR. The EXFOR database preserves experimental nuclear reaction data true to its original documentation and information from the authors of the data. MEDUSAL will deviate from EXFOR by storing additional information from users of the data for their fields of work (evaluation, model development, validation, etc.). This includes expert judgment on the data sets, identification of data points as outliers, renormalization of the data to the newest monitor reactions, and estimations of missing uncertainty sources. The format for MEDUSAL is being developed to enable easy automatic parsing of large amounts of data. Here, we will summarize the use cases, high-level requirements and first steps towards developing the database MEDUSAL and the API to access it.