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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.
Victor Viallon, Elias Y. Garcia Cervantes, Laurent Buiron
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 12 | December 2025 | Pages 2037-2054
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2025.2534304
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Uncertainty quantification of neutronics quantities of interest during irradiation needs to be based on reliable sensitivities that are able to correctly describe the fuel depletion and the impact of the input data. The classical approach with the Standard Perturbation Theory (SPT) is not sufficient to obtain sensitivity for the entire set of nuclear data involved in the reactivity loss phenomenon. Recent developments in the APOLLO3® code package allow computing Boltzmann/Bateman coupling at the sensitivity scale with the Depletion Perturbation Theory. This improved functionality helps in quantifying contributions from all nuclear data involved in the depletion process: cross-sections, fission yields, and KERMA, among others. However, its applicability in the case of “real” reactor context often requires restricting the calculation to a single cycle, thus forgetting information from the previous irradiation cycles due to complex reloading patterns that takes place in between. To address this challenge, approximations based on a restricted irradiation history can be employed. This paper demonstrates that the corresponding “partial” sensitivities effectively replicate the global behavior of the reference sensitivities for the majority of nuclear reactions when compared to SPT sensitivities. However, they also result in a significant overestimation of the sensitivity norm for the main heavy-nuclei cross-sections as the unconsidered irradiation time increases. The impact of this bias on reactivity loss uncertainty is quantified, and the primary affected contributors are highlighted.