Industry

EASY European Activation SYstem

The European Activation System (EASY), developed and maintained at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, is an international standard for data on activation – transmutation caused by nuclear reactions. It integrates information from collaborators around the world into a single user-friendly package which is invaluable for fusion researchers and has wider applications for industry.

EASY-2007 consists of an extensive range of code, data and documentation all aimed at the calculation of the response of materials irradiated by neutrons, deuterons or protons. This new version includes cross section data for deuteron- and proton-induced reactions as well as the neutron data in previous versions. All cross sections covers the energy range 0-60 MeV. It is designed to investigate fusion devices which will act as intense sources of high energy (14 MeV) neutrons and cause significant activation-transmutation of the surrounding materials. Another fusion related activity is the planned materials testing in IFMIF. This is based on an accelerator and will produce neutrons with energies up to 55 MeV. Activation calculations on IFMIF can be carried out using EASY-2007.

The very general nature of the calculational method and the data libraries used for EASY-2007 mean that it is applicable to all situations (e.g. fission reactors or neutron sources) where materials are exposed to neutrons below 60 MeV. In addition activation of materials by deuterons or protons in accelerators can also be calculated. The components of EASY can be divided into two parts: library/code development tools; and user tools. The former are required to develop the latter, however EASY users only need to be able to use the inventory code FISPACT and be aware of the contents of the EAF library (the data source).

The generation of the European Activation File (EAF) is carried out via the SAFEPAQ-II application, which uses as input many world-wide sources of nuclear data. These evaluated files, calculations and experimental data are used to construct a collection of cross section data for neutron-, deuteron- and proton-induced reactions on an extensive set of target nuclides (both stable and unstable), a set of decay data files and other data libraries required by FISPACT.

EASY-2007 is available for personal computers running Windows (2000, XP, Vista and 7) and for UNIX and OsX workstations. It comprises the EAF-2007 nuclear data libraries, FISPACT-2007 and documentation (seven reports). For Windows users there is an additional tool – the EASY-2007 User Interface that enables FISPACT to be run, output files to be summarised, graphs plotted and the EAF data to be viewed.

For more information please contact Jean-Christophe Sublet at CCFE – email
jean-christophe.sublet@ccfe.ac.uk.