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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.
Enrica Belfiore, Federico Grimaldi, Luca Fiorito, Pablo Romojaro, Gašper Žerovnik, Pierre-Etienne Labeau, Sandra Dulla
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S836-S857
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2323217
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo sampling is frequently employed for uncertainty quantification in depletion calculations. Several assumptions are needed to perform this analysis. In this work, an assessment of these assumptions is proposed via sample convergence studies and perturbation of the sampling distribution. The Uncertainty Analysis in Best-Estimate Modeling (UAM) Pincell Hot Full Power and the Turkey Point reference cases were considered for this purpose. The 235U thermal independent fission yield uncertainties evaluated in JEFF-3.3 and JEFF-4.0 were propagated to the nuclide vector and to the system multiplication factor. Using JEFF-4.0 data, a 75% reduction in the uncertainty of selected nuclide concentrations and an 80% reduction in the multiplication factor uncertainty were observed, showcasing the effect of full covariance evaluations. The presented results also prove that the uncertainty in the considered observables shows marginal dependence on the sampling distribution.