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OSTP memo guides space nuclear plan
A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum released on Tuesday guides NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense on their roles in deploying near-term space nuclear power.
This follows a series of NASA announcements last month—driven by the executive order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” issued by Trump in December—including an ambitious timeline for establishing a moon base, which would rely on fission surface power (FSP) to survive the long lunar night at the moon’s south pole, and plans for a nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) rocket to be launched in 2028.
Patrick Jaffke
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 190 | Number 3 | June 2018 | Pages 258-270
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1429173
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present a self-consistency analysis of fission product yield evaluations. Anomalous yields are determined using a series of simple conservation checks and comparing charge distributions with common parameterizations. The summed average prompt neutron multiplicity for both products as a function of the heavy product mass is derived directly from the independent fission product yields with a procedure utilizing average charge conservation. This procedure is validated with Monte Carlo simulations of the de-excitation of the fission fragments in a Hauser-Feshbach statistical decay framework. The derived is compared with experimental data, when available, and then used to determine the prompt neutron multiplicity for the various evaluations. The propagated errors on from the average charge conservation method are significantly lower than the simple summation rules, which reveals that some evaluations are inconsistent with prompt neutron data. We propose possible solutions to remedy the observed inconsistencies and identify sources of the observed differences in between the various evaluation libraries.