Nuclear interactions can be the source of atomic displacement, embrittlement and post-short-term cascade annealing defects in irradiated structural materials. Such metrics are derived from, or can be correlated to, nuclear kinematic simulations of primary atomic energy distributions spectra and the quantification of the numbers of secondary defects produced per primary as a function of the available recoils, residual and emitted, energies and spectra. Recoils kinematics of neutral, residual, charged and also now including multi-particle emissions occurring at high MeV range energy are more rigorously treated when based on modern, complete and enhanced nuclear data parsed in state of the art processing tools. Examples using the latest processing protocols and metrics applied on recently released TENDL-2017, ENDF/B-VIII and JENDL-4 are given, while novel approaches are proposed.