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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.
Amanda M. Bachmann, Oleksandr Yardas, Madicken Munk
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 5 | May 2025 | Pages 736-749
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2393940
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fuel depletion is an important aspect of fuel cycle modeling, allowing a user to account for how loaded fuel compositions affect in-core and spent fuel compositions and their related fuel cycle metrics. Therefore, multiple methods have been developed to account for depletion within fuel cycle simulations. This work adds to that list of methods by introducing an open-source coupling between Cyclus and OpenMC to perform fuel depletion during a fuel cycle simulation, called OpenMCyclus. This work explains the methodology of OpenMCyclus and presents a benchmark comparison between the performance of OpenMCyclus and another Cyclus archetype that uses recipes to define spent fuel compositions. The development of this coupling expands the functionalities possible through Cyclus by providing real-time fuel depletion that is reactor agnostic and open source.