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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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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Latest News
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.
Ki Yong Choi, Hyun Sik Park, Seok Cho, Kyoung Ho Kang, Nam Hyun Choi, Won Pil Baek, Yeon Sik Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 3 | September 2011 | Pages 604-618
Technical Paper | NURETH-13 Special / Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12509
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The direct vessel injection (DVI)-adopted power plant APR1400 considers a DVI line break among the analyzed small-break loss-of-coolant accidents in safety analysis. The first-ever integral effects test database for various DVI line break sizes from 5% to 100% was established with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute's Advanced Thermal-Hydraulic Test Loop for Accident Simulation (ATLAS) test facility. This database enhances our physical understanding of the major thermal-hydraulic behaviors of the APR1400 during DVI line break accidents, and it can also be used to examine the prediction capabilities and identify any deficiencies in the existing best-estimate safety analysis codes. Effects of the break size were experimentally investigated, and the best-estimated MARS code was assessed against the experimental database. On the whole, the prediction of the MARS code shows a good agreement with the measured data. However, the code predicted a higher core level than the data just before a loop seal clearing occurs, and it also produced a more rapid decrease in the downcomer water level than the data. These disagreements are the expected consequence of uncertainties in predicting countercurrent flow or condensation phenomena in a downcomer region. The present integral effects test data will be used to support the present conservative safety analysis methodology and to develop a new best-estimate safety analysis methodology on the DVI line break accidents of the APR1400.