SCALE About

SCALE Team

SCALE Team

SCALE is a comprehensive modeling and simulation suite for nuclear safety analysis and design developed and maintained by Oak Ridge National Laboratory under contract with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Nuclear Security Administration to perform reactor physics, criticality safety, radiation shielding, and spent fuel characterization for nuclear facilities and transportation/storage package designs.

The SCALE 6.3 validation report four-volume set is now available on OSTI:

  1. SCALE 6.3 Validation: Reactor Physics
  2. SCALE 6.3 Validation: Nuclear Criticality Safety
  3. SCALE 6.3 Validation: Spent Nuclear Fuel
  4. SCALE 6.3 Validation: Radiation Shielding

The SCALE 6.3.2 Online Manual is now available.

The SCALE 2026 Calendar is now available.

The 10th SCALE Users’ Group Workshop (virtual event) will be held June 8-12, 2026. For more information about the workshop, please click here.

The SCALE website contains the following major sections:

  • Overview: additional details on SCALE capabilities.
  • Releases: details on SCALE releases.
  • Learning: information on upcoming in-person training courses at ORNL, SCALE primers, and learning modules that are based on our training courses experience.
  • References: links to downloadable scientific journal articles and reports with bibtex for easy citing of SCALE references.
  • Support: how to get help with SCALE, including presentations, annual reports, newsletters, and QA documents.  

Please direct any inquiries to scalehelp@ornl.gov. 

For general SCALE references, please cite the latest manual.

W. A. Wieselquist, R. A. Lefebvre, Eds., SCALE 6.3.2 User Manual, ORNL/TM-2024/3386, UT-Battelle, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (February 2024).

For more specific references see https://www.ornl.gov/scale/references.