RSICC CODE PACKAGE PSR-527

RSICC CODE PACKAGE PSR-527

RSICC no longer distributes MACCS or SECPOP. If you are interested in obtaining MACCS or SECPOP, please address your request to SPBCODES.Resource@NRC.GOV at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

1. NAME AND TITLE

SECPOP2000 Version 3.12: Code System for Sector Population, Land Fraction and Economic Estimation.

See the August 2007 memo (appended to this file) regarding issues in SECPOP2000.

2. CONTRIBUTORS

Sandia National Laboratory., Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC.

3. CODING LANGUAGE AND COMPUTER

Visual Basic; Pentium (P00527IBMPC00).

4. NATURE OF PROBLEM SOLVED

SECPOP2000 calculates estimated population and economic data about any point (specified by longitude and latitude) that lies within the continental United States. Population estimates can be made using any appropriately formatted population file, but SECPOP2000 currently includes files based on 1990 and 2000 US Census Bureau data. Likewise, economic estimates can be made using any appropriately formatted economic file. SECPOP2000 currently includes 1992 and 1997 US Census Bureau data. Population estimates are made using block level census data, and economic estimates are made using county level census data.

The previous version, SECPOP90, (distributed by RSICC as PSR-378) supports two types of analysis: site and regional. Site analysis provides population and economic data estimates for any location within the continental United States. Calculation results can be displayed, printed, or saved as a rosette, a table, a MACCS2 (MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System) site file, or a MACCS2‑like comma‑separated‑variable file. Regional analysis assesses compliance of available sites against siting parameters (i.e., specific population density criteria). Regional analysis is not supported in SECPOP2000 because some of the software packages originally used for regional analysis are no longer available.

5. METHOD OF SOLUTION

SECPOP2000 uses the latest (2000) census data, which provide greater resolution than the 1980 and 1990 census data. This greater resolution is achieved by employing over eight million census‑block data points and performing the sector population estimates directly from these points. This is an increase of approximately two million data points over the 1990 census data.

6. RESTRICTIONS OR LIMITATIONS

SECPOP2000 currently supports only site analysis. Regional analysis can be performed by using SECPOP90 as a screening tool followed by a confirmatory calculation with SECPOP2000 to evaluate potential sites with 2000 census data..

7. TYPICAL RUNNING TIME

The running times of calculations are data dependent.

8. COMPUTER HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

The SECPOP2000 software runs on Pentium or faster Intel processors and requires approximately 170 megabytes of hard‑disk storage. The minimum recommended screen resolution is 800x600.

9. COMPUTER SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

SECPOP2000 was developed to run on personal computers under the Windows 98Ô, NTÔ, 2000Ô, and XPÔ operating systems. The included executable was compiled with Visual Basic Version 6.0 with service pack 5 including TrueDBGrid Pro 7.0. See the reference report for information on data-base construction and program verification.

10. REFERENCE

N.E. Bixler, S.A. Shannon, C.W. Morrow, B.E. Meloche, and J.N. Ridgely, “SECPOP2000: Sector Population, Land Fraction, and Economic Estimation Program,” NUREG/CR‑6525, Rev. 1 (August 2003).

11. CONTENTS OF CODE PACKAGE

Included in the package are the referenced document and a CD rom which includes a setup.exe file that will install the executables, document and directories with census data, site data, and plotting data. Note that SECPOP source files are not included in this package.

12. DATE OF ABSTRACT

January 2004, abstract revised August 2007.

KEYWORDS: REACTOR SITING; POPULATION; ECONOMICS

From: Bixler, Nathan E [nbixler@sandia.gov]
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 6:06 PM
To: Distribution
Subject: Problems with SECPOP2000

Dear SECPOP2000 User:

If you are not a SECPOP2000 user, please disregard this message.

Two problems with SECPOP2000 have recently been discovered. There is a work-around for both problems, but the one for the first problem has not been tested thoroughly and may not work in all cases.

Problem 1: SECPOP2000 reads the County97.dat file incorrectly.

Description of problem: SECPOP2000 expects there to be an entry in the Notes field at the end of each record of the county data file. County97.dat has a blank in this field for most of the records. As a result, many of the records are skipped and the mapping between the census block and the county in which it resides is incorrect.

A second issue further exacerbates this problem. There are a number of gaps in the numbering of the counties. SECPOP2000 expects the numbering to be sequential. The first gap is for county number 955. Counties beyond 955 are handled incorrectly by SECPOP2000. There are a total of 37 county indices that are currently skipped in the file. These correspond to counties that no longer exist.

Workaround: We have verified that editing the County97.dat file to include at least one character in the Notes field for every record where the field is currently blank fixes the first issue described above. The second issue should be able to be fixed by inserting dummy lines for the missing county indices; however, we have not tested this workaround and cannot assure the user that this will work correctly.

The SECPOP2000 user is advised to perform sufficient checking of land fraction and economic results in the output file to verify that the results are correct for his/her application.

Problem 2: SECPOP2000 produces incorrectly formatted regional economic data.

Description of problem: MACCS2 expects the site file to be formatted as described in the MACCS2 User's Manual. The format of the Regional Economic Data portion of the site file produced by SECPOP2000 is not correct.

Workaround: The workaround for this problem is to delete white space so that the columns of data are correctly aligned. An example is as follows:

Regional Economic Data produced by SECPOP2000

REGIONAL ECONOMIC DATA
   1 EXCLUSION     0.047     0.277    4009.0   20811.0 204149.0
   2 REGION_02     0.047     0.277    4009.0   20811.0 204149.0
   …

Reformatted Regional Economic Data

REGIONAL ECONOMIC DATA
   1 EXCLUSION     0.047 0.277    4009.0   20811.0 204149.0
   2 REGION_02     0.047 0.277    4009.0   20811.0 204149.0
      …

Further work is underway to diagnose, test, and correct these problems. Please let me know if you are currently using SECPOP2000. We intend to make a new version of SECPOP2000 available in the near future that corrects the problems described above.

Nate Bixler
Principal Investigator for MACCS2 Development
Sandia National Laboratories