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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.
Zhanpeng Huang, Yunki Jo, Qingming He, Liangzhi Cao, Hongchun Wu, Deokjung Lee
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 9 | September 2025 | Pages 1391-1405
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2438570
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study introduces a novel DXTRAN-based weight window generator (DWWG) for variance reduction in Monte Carlo (MC) radiation shielding calculations implemented in the MCS code developed at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology. DWWG eliminates the iterative generation required by traditional weight window generators (WWGs) while ensuring target region scoring through the embedded DXTRAN. By incorporating virtual tracks of DXTRAN into the importance estimation, DWWG produces high-quality weight windows. Performance verification of two radiation shielding problems demonstrated that weight windows generated by DWWG, when combined with direct simulation or DXTRAN, yielded increased figures of merit and reduced relative standard deviations. These results establish DWWG as an effective WWG for variance reduction in MC simulations.