Abstract
SCALE is a widely used suite of tools for nuclear systems modeling and simulation that provides comprehensive, verified and validated, user-friendly capabilities for criticality safety, reactor physics, radiation shielding, and sensitivity and uncertainty analysis. For more than 30 years, regulators, industry, and research institutions around the world have used SCALE for nuclear safety analysis and design. However, the underlying architecture of SCALE is based on a 40-year old design with dozens of independent functional modules and control programs, primarily implemented in the Fortran programming language, with extensive use of customized intermediate files to control the logical flow of the analysis. Data are passed between individual computational codes using custom binary files that are read from and written to the hard disk. The SCALE modernization plan provides a progression towards SCALE 7, which will provide an object-oriented parallel-enabled software infrastructure with state-of-the-art methods implemented as reusable components. This paper provides a brief overview of the goals of SCALE modernization and details some modernized features available with SCALE 6.2.
