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Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
O. P. Joneja, M. Rosselet, A. Luethi, J. Ligou, R. P. Anand, T. Buchillier
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 4 | November 1995 | Pages 1663-1673
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30433
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Heat deposition rate measurements are made by an extremely sensitive quasi-adiabatic graphite calorimeter and thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs) in the fusion environment of the LOTUS facility. The response of a bare calorimeter and the response inside a large graphite cylindrical block are measured by irradiating with a mixed neutron and gamma field of the Haefely neutron generator. The reproducibility of these measurements is found to be better than 1% for a dose rate more than 60 cGy/min and better than 3.8% for dose rates in the range of 6 to 60 cGy/min. The heating rates are found to vary linearly with neutron source strength. The calculation to experiment (C/E) for the bare calorimeter is found to be 1.05, whereas inside the graphite block, C/E varies from 1.11 to 1.32. These measurements are analyzed by the MCNP Monte Carlo neutron and photon transport code using the BMCCS2, PHOTXS2, and EL2 cross-section libraries. The influence of wall-returned neutrons and gammas is found to be negligible. The origin of the discrepancies is found by measuring the gamma component of the heating at identical locations by conducting special geometry irradiation using several TLDs-700. The conditions that are employed considerably simplify the transformation of the TLD results to that of the graphite medium. A detailed data treatment is done with the TLD outputs to arrive at the gamma heating component at different locations in the graphite by employing the Burlin theory. The gamma production is found to be well represented in the calculations. On the other hand, measured and calculated net nuclear heating in the graphite differ considerably. A downward revision of the neutron kerma factor would be desirable.
