Web Based Nuclear Criticality Safety Bibliographic Database

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has prepared a Nuclear Criticality Safety Bibliographic Database that is now available via the Internet. This database is a component of the U.S. DOE Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) Web site. This WWW resource was developed as part of the DOE response to the DNFSB Recommendation 97-2, which reflected the need to make criticality safety information available to a wide audience. To the extent possible, the hyperlinks on the Web pages direct the user to original source of the reference material in order to ensure accuracy and access to the latest versions. A master index is in place for simple navigation through the site. A search capability is available to assist in locating the on-line reference materials. Among the features included are: A user-friendly site map for ease of use; A personnel registry; Links to all major laboratories and organizations involved in the many aspects of criticality safety; General help for new criticality safety practitioners, including basic technical references and training modules; A discussion of computational methods; An interactive question and answer forum for the criticality safety community; and Collections of bibliographic references mdvahdation experiments. This paper will focus on the bibliographic database. This database evolved from earlier work done by the DOE's Nuclear Criticality Information System (NCIS) maintained at LLNL during the 1980s. The bibliographic database at the time of the termination of NCIS were composed principally of three parts: (1) A critical experiment bibliography of 1067 citations (reported in UCRL-52769); (2) A compilation of criticality safety papers from Volumes 1 through 41 of the Transactions of the American Nuclear Society (reported in UCRL-53369); and (3) A general criticality bibliography of several thousand citations (unpublished). When the NCIS project was terminated the database was nearly lost but, fortunately, several years later most of the data were restored from backup tapes that had been archived by LLNL's ICNC conferences and American Nuclear Society publications, Nuclear Science and Engineering and Nuclear Technology. Since the Rocky Flats facility is heading for closure maintenance of the database was again threatened. This has now been avoided since LLNL was selected in 1999 to fulfill part of the ''Information Preservation and Dissemination'' task of the DOE's Nuclear Criticality Safety Program Five-Year Plan. This effort will ''collect, preserve and make readily available criticality safety information'' and make the information available via the Internet.

A bibliographic criticality safety database of over 13,000 records is available on the Internet as part of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Nuclear Criticality Safety Program (NCSP) website. This database is easy to access via the Internet and gets substantial daily usage. This database and other criticality safety resources are available at ncsp.llnl.gov. The web database has evolved from more than thirty years of effort at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), beginning with compilations of critical experiment reports and American Nuclear Society Transactions.

The U.S. Department of Energy supports a nuclear criticality safety bibliographic internet database that contains approximately 15,000 records. We are working to ensure that a substantial portion of the corresponding hardcopy documents are preserved, digitized, and made available to criticality safety practitioners via the Nuclear Criticality Safety Program web site.

This paper will discuss some basic technical information resources that would be helpful to the novice nuclear criticality safety specialist. These include bibliographic and benchmark compilations, handbooks, and online resources. The specialist should also be familiar with benchmark quality experimental data needed for code validation. This paper will also discuss the critical experiment data obtained in the 1950s and 1960s at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.