Progress report from the OECD/NEA Data Bank

The annual meeting of the Data Bank management committee (the NEA Nuclear Science Committee Executive Group) was held in June 2007. The main discussion concerned future directions of the NEA Data Bank and general views on how to maintain high quality services to member countries. A secretary for the head of the Data Bank, Roopa Chauhan, has been appointed, while Federico Mompean has left the TDB project and the NEA. The compilation of experimental data into the EXFOR database has progressed as planned with 58 new neutron induced data sets and 67 new charged-particle induced data sets entered since the last NRDC meeting. The CINDA database, containing bibliographic information, has been updated and was published in 7 volumes (in total 5400 pages) as an archival book in September 2007. It was distributed worldwide to about 250 libraries, research facilities and nuclear data centres. The JANIS nuclear data display software has been upgraded and a beta version was released in April 2007. The official version of JANIS-3 was released in June 2007 after further checking of the software. It is now a much appreciated tool for nuclear data users, with over 25 000 accesses per month to the NEA databases containing nuclear data. The high priority request list for nuclear data, within the Working Party on international nuclear data Evaluation Cooperation (WPEC), has been updated and contains now 5 high priority requests and 6 general requests. The requests are divided into 'general' and 'high priority', and the rules for 'general' requests to be accepted have been relaxed so as to admit more of this type. A new WPEC subgroup (number 30 in the series) was formed to deal with the 'Quality assessment and improvement of usability of the experimental database EXFOR' in collaboration with the NRDC. A validation report of JEFF-3.1, JEFF Report 22, is being prepared and the structure of the report has been decided. The plan for the next nuclear data library, JEFF-3.2, was outlined, with new evaluations being prepared on 235,238U, 239Pu, Cr, Mn, Ta and W, as well as a new activation data library. The new library is planned to include more covariance data as well as photonuclear data. A revision of the decay data library, JEFF-3.1.1, was also agreed for release in autumn 2007. The current phase of the Thermochemical Database (TDB) project has been prolonged until 31 January 2008, and a fourth phase, TDB IV, will start on February 1, 2008. Ten volumes have so far been published in the series of reviews and the work in present phase of the TDB project is concentrating on finalising the three reviews on Thorium, Tin and Iron. The first of these reviews is planned for publication in 2007, the latter two in 2008. The collaboration with the US-DOE on computer code exchange was recently restarted with 20 codes received and 62 codes distributed. Several training courses have been carried out and recently, courses on MCNPX and SCALE-5 (TRITON) were organised at the NEA