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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
Meeting Spotlight
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
Standards Program
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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Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
M. Z. Youssef, A. Kumar, M. A. Abdou, Y. Oyama, H. Maekawa
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 2 | September 1995 | Pages 366-387
Technical Paper | Fusion Neutronics Integral Experiments — Part II / Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30651
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The role of the neutronics experimentation and analysis infusion neutronics research and development programs is discussed. A new methodology was developed to arrive at estimates to design safety factors based on the experimental and analytical results from design-oriented integral experiments. In this methodology, and for a particular nuclear response, R, a normalized density function (NDF) is constructed from the prediction uncertainties, ui's, and their associated standard deviations, ±δi's, as found in the various integral experiments where that response, R, is measured. Important statistical parameters are derived from the NDF, such as the global mean prediction uncertainty, ū, and the possible spread, ±δu, around it. The method of deriving safety factors from many possible NDFs based on various calculational and measuring methods (among other variants) is also described. Associated with each safety factor is a confidence level, designers may choose to have, that the calculated response, R, will not exceed (or will not fall below) the actual measured value. An illustrative example is given on how to construct the NDFs. The methodology is applied in two areas, namely the line-integrated tritium production rate and bulk shielding integral experiments. Conditions under which these factors could be derived and the validity of the method are discussed. The described methodology could be applied to the integral experiments proposed for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) neutronics research and development, particularly, in deriving the required safety factors for ITER shielding.