The International Handbook of Evaluated Criticality Safety Benchmark Experiments was prepared by a working group comprised of experienced criticality safety personnel from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Russian Federation, France, Hungary, Republic of Korea, Slovenia, Serbia, Kazakhstan, Israel, Spain, Brazil, Czech Republic, Poland, India, Canada and Sweden. The handbook contains criticality safety benchmark specifications that have been derived from experiments that were performed at various nuclear critical facilities around the world. The benchmark specifications are intended for use by criticality safety engineers to validate calculational techniques used to establish minimum subcritical margins for operations with fissile material. The example calculations presented do not constitute a validation of the codes or cross section data.

The handbook contains 464 evaluations with benchmark specifications for 4092 critical, near-critical, or subcritical configurations and 21 criticality alarm placement/shielding configurations with multiple dose points for each, and 46 configurations that have been categorized as fundamental physics measurements that are relevant to criticality safety applications. Experiments that are found unacceptable for use as criticality safety benchmark experiments are discussed in the handbook evaluations; however, benchmark specifications are not derived for such experiments. Approximately 676 experimental configurations are categorized as unacceptable for use as criticality safety benchmark experiments. Additional evaluations are in progress and will be added to the handbook periodically.

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