Development of a nuclear spallation simulation code and calculations of primary spallation products

In order to make evaluations of computational models for the nuclear spallation reaction from a nuclear physics point of view, a simulation code NUCLEUS has been developed by modifying and combining the Monte Carlo codes NMTC/JAERI and NMTA/JAERI for calculating only the nuclear spallation reaction (intranuclear cascade + evaporation and/or fast fission) between a nucleus and a projectile without taking into consideration of internuclear transport. New several plotting routines have been provided for the rapid process of much more event data, obtained by using the ARGUS plotting system. The results obtained by our code can be directly compared with the experimental results using by thin foil experiments in which internuclear multiple collisions have little effects, and will serve to upgrade the calculational methods and the values of nuclear parameters currently used in the calculations. Some discussions are done about the preliminary computational results obtained by using NUCLEUS. The mass distribution and charge dispersion of reaction products are examined in some detail for the nuclear spallation reaction between incident protons and target nuclei, such as U, Pb and Ag, in the energy range from 0.5 GeV to 3.0 GeV. These results show that the distribution of reaction products ceases to change its form as the proton energy increases over about 2 GeV. The same tendency is seen in the energy dependence of the number of primary particles emitted from a nucleus. After spallation reactions, a variety of nuclei, especially many neutron deficient nuclides with nuclear charges nearly equal to ones of a target nucleus, are produced. Due to their short lifetime most of them will change to stable nuclides in due time. Finally, some important issues are discussed to improve the present simulation method. (author)