The 2024 Edition of the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP) Handbook was published in December 2025 and is available upon request.
The ICSBEP Handbook contains criticality safety benchmark specifications that have been derived from experiments that were performed at various critical facilities around the world. The benchmark specifications are intended for use by criticality safety analysts and may be useful to nuclear data evaluators to validate calculational techniques and data. The handbook is produced by the ICSBEP technical review group (TRG), under the aegis of the NEA Nuclear Science Committee.
The evaluated criticality safety benchmark data in the 2024 edition are presented in nine volumes. These volumes span over 81 000 pages and contain 598 evaluations with benchmark specifications for 5 168 critical, near-critical or subcritical configurations, 51 criticality alarm placement/shielding configurations with multiple dose points for each, and 246 configurations which have been categorised as fundamental physics measurements that are relevant to criticality safety applications.
New to the handbook are one benchmark for fundamental physics, FUND-LLNL-DT-PE-PNDA-001, a pulsed-neutron die-away (PNDA) measurement of polyethylene and polymethyl methacrylate targets, and one critical benchmark, HEU-MET-INTER-013, a highly enriched uranium (HEU) benchmark with seven configurations that features hafnium. This edition also includes a major update and revision to HEU-MET-FAST-028, the evaluation of the critical measurement of the HEU core for Flattop. These evaluations were approved during the 2024 meeting of the ICSBEP TRG, which was hosted on 16-17 April 2024 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States.
Attendees of the 2024 ICSBEP TRG meeting, which was hosted by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States
