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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.
Eric Aboud, Jesse Norris, Daniel Siefman
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S531-S536
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2328452
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Integral benchmarks for criticality safety and nuclear data validation require expensive uncertainty quantification studies. In general, uncertainty quantification techniques ignore correlations between experiments and shared components. Experiments, such as the Thermal/Epithermal eXperiments (TEX) campaigns, consist of many shared components, such as the Jemima highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel plates, which create a strong correlation in their uncertainties. While these correlations are known to exist, they are often not estimated because of the complexity of such calculations. This paper describes an intuitive method of determining the covariance for each of the experimental components, providing a correlation for each family of components across the multiple cases examined within a benchmark. A proof-of-principle study using the TEX-HEU experimental campaign was performed and verified that the covariance and correlation matrices can be calculated with information commonly found in the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project benchmarks. This study showed that the introduction of model and experimental covariances reduces the χ2 per degree of freedom from 2.203 to 1.179, indicating that the omission causes overly pessimistic bias quantifications. This technique can be seamlessly integrated to current benchmark evaluations as well as reevaluations of legacy benchmarks.