Speaker
Description
The Shielding Integral Benchmark Archive Database (SINBAD) was established in the late 1990’s as a collaborative undertaking between the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC), with the aim to preserve the information on radiation shielding experiments, to answer codes and nuclear data validation needs and to make benchmarks available in a standardised format to the international community. In 2021, the NEA Expert Group on Physics of Reactor Systems (EGPRS) initiated a SINBAD Task Force (TF) gathering shielding experts, experimentalists and benchmark evaluators with the aim to reinvigorate the work on SINBAD and to reactivate its community.
Between 2021 and 2025, the SINBAD TF has successfully steered the development of the database providing new documentation, new maintenance processes and new entries to be evaluated. In 2024, the database migrated to the NEA GitLab server, leading to SINBAD Version 2: a transparent, collaborative, version-controlled, and continuously improved database of 102 entries. In 2024 and 2025, the SINBAD TF approved the first two major additions to the database in ten years: a new evaluation of experimental measurements performed at the Health Physics Research Reactor (HPRR) at ORNL and a complete revision of the pre-existing ORNL Oxygen Broomstick evaluation. Three other existing evaluations also went through minor revisions. These accomplishments demonstrated the new collaborative opportunities offered by the transition to the NEA GitLab server and the updated licences and maintenance processes. With the momentum gained by the Task Force, the NEA Nuclear Science Committee (NSC) decided in 2025 to promote it to a Technical Review Group (TRG). This newly mandated body is composed of 22 delegates representing 11 NEA member countries. The first meeting of
the TRG was held in February 2026 and its first mandate runs until December 2027.
The SINBAD TRG mandate now also includes the preservation of numerical intercomparisons to contribute to the international verification effort, as it was suggested by the SATIF-16 participants. The first numerical entry in SINBAD consists of the compilation and analysis of intercomparison exercises developed through the successive SATIF meetings. The report, still under review, focuses on three major intercomparison exercises in iron and concrete shields: attenuation of medium and high energy neutrons, dose caused by medium energy neutrons and neutron energy spectra comparison.
During its meeting in February, the SINBAD TRG proposed several new potential entries, including an evaluation of measurements reported by the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) of induced radioactivity from a mercury target irradiated at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) using a 24/2.83 GeV proton beam. Other proposals included evaluations of zirconium and oxygen broomsticks neutron transmission experiments, evaluations of 238U neutron transmission experiments and a numerical intercomparison derived from a simplified alarm placement benchmark from the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP).
A subgroup to develop machine-readable data formats for SINBAD was also proposed. This follows the overall data management strategy of the NSC and its adaption to recent changes in the way data is consumed. Experts and data users specifically express needs for machine-readable data, standardised data formats and application programming interfaces (APIs), while maintaining state-of-the-art quality assurance for the data. The goal of the subgroup is to propose a pilot machine-readable entry from the SINBAD database, accompanied with wellspecified data formats. These formats will be designed in conjunction with the subgroups supervising similar efforts in other NSC databases.
The presentation will provide an overview of the above-mentioned accomplishments made by the SINBAD Task Force and objectives of the new SINBAD Technical Review Group.
| Topics | T3. Code benchmarking and intercomparison |
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