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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.
Alexis Maldonado, Christopher Perfetti
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 2086-2098
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2162782
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
When designing experiments for full-scale reactor systems, the Monte Carlo N-Particle® and Whisper codes can be used to create neutronic models and compare the similarity of two nuclear systems via correlation coefficients for , the effective multiplication factor. This paper applies this framework to a conceptual heat pipe yttrium-hydride-moderated microreactor system and experiments, but the method can be applied generally to any nuclear reactor design. The framework is intended as a supplement to other neutronics/thermal/multiphysics analyses and provides an objective method to measure the neutronic similarity of two systems. By analyzing the shared nuclear data uncertainty, as well as sensitivity to nuclear data over all neutron energies, highly informative experiments can be designed to aid in the development of microreactor and other advanced reactor technologies and systems.