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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.
Alan Hesu, Sungmin Kim, Fan Zhang
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 8 | August 2025 | Pages 1292-1309
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2239635
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current preventative maintenance paradigms in nuclear power plants carry several costly risks and challenges associated with component downtime and the need for human data collection. Preventative maintenance may be enabled by an online monitoring system that accurately assesses component condition and identifies potential faults. We present an approach for autonomous online monitoring and multiagent planning for robotic data collection. Under the occurrence of a fault, we utilize a machine learning model to form an initial guess of its nature, which we then refine by selectively measuring certain variables to gain additional information via a situation-aware variable selection model. To generate a multi-robot plan to conduct these measurements, we develop a preference-based planning framework within a linear temporal logic–based planning approach that prioritizes collecting data from the most important features. Finally, we demonstrate our approach on a case study using a simulated nuclear power plant circulating water system, showing fault diagnostic performance as well as simulated robot data collection.