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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.
Kyle M. Ramey, Bojan Petrovic
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 11 | November 2025 | Pages 1934-1953
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2464460
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced High Temperature Reactor (AHTR) is a prismatic Fluoride salt cooled High temperature Reactor (FHR) fueled by TRISO particles with a relatively large power of 3400 MW(thermal). Because of its double heterogeneity in fuel element geometry and complexity to model it, transport simulations of AHTR have mostly focused on using Monte Carlo methods. Detailed depletion studies with elements of multiphysics have not been done previously on AHTR, which created the need for a new tool to do so. A C++ script was created to enable such analyses of AHTR, including temperature feedback, thermal expansion, material property changes, and criticality search on control rod position. This paper begins with a brief summary of modeling capabilities and methodologies. Then, attention turns to depletion analysis of AHTR. In this work, five depletion cases of varying degrees of resolution and features are considered with results and comparisons presented. Three-dimensional depletion cases include single material tracking (core average), fine spatial tracking (4032 zones), thermal-hydraulic feedback substeps between burnup steps, criticality iteration substeps via control rod movement between burnup steps, and use of both criticality and thermal-hydraulic iteration substeps between burnup steps. The final case illustrates the full functionality to run detailed depletion studies in an automated fashion with elements of multiphysics. Although only applicable to AHTR, the script enables analyses not previously possible with existing tools and advances the state of the art for AHTR core design.