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Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Enrique Castillo, Cristina Solares, Patricia Gómez
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 2 | June 1997 | Pages 158-167
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24469
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new method is presented for propagating uncertainties in complex nuclear power plant safety system fault tree models. The method is especially useful for estimating extreme percentiles and high-probability one-sided confidence intervals of the system unavailability. Likelihood weighing simulation methods, which assign a score to each sample point (x1,... ,xn) to compensate for the differences between the sample and the parent distributions, are used to directly simulate the adequate tail distribution of the probability of the fault tree top event. The polynomial structure of the probability of the top event is exploited to sequentially find upper and lower bounds to simulate each of the basic variables, without the need to invert the polynomial expression. The performance of the proposed method is spectacular when compared with the standard Monte Carlo simulation for tails. Finally, one example of application to a real case is used to illustrate the whole simulation process.