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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Pascal Lemaitre, Emmanuel Porcheron, Amandine Nuboer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 3 | September 2011 | Pages 553-571
Technical Paper | NURETH-13 Special / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12506
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During the course of a hypothetical severe accident in a nuclear power plant, spray may be activated in order to reduce static pressure in the containment. The Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) has developed the TOSQAN experiment to provide a better understanding of the heat transfer and mass transfer that take place between a spray and the surrounding confined gas in such a situation. This paper studies how the temperature of the spray at the injection point influences the dynamics of a test. To carry out this analysis, we performed two spray tests: spray test 101 (ST101), which served as a reference, and spray test 107 (ST107), which had exactly the same initial and boundary conditions except for the temperature of the spray at the injection point, which varied from 25°C to 58°C. First, we present the entire scenario for ST101 and ST107 and the results of the tests. We then focus our analysis on the intercomparison of the thermal-hydraulic behavior induced by the spray temperature at the injection point and the wall temperature. This intercomparison is divided into two parts: global and local.
