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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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.
Gianfranco Saiu, Gabriele del Nero, Antonio Madonna, Giuseppe Marella, Andrea Orazi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 115 | Number 3 | September 1996 | Pages 320-332
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A15842
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Activity concerning the development of a RELAP5/MOD3 model to simulate the Westinghouse Electric Corporation AP600 is summarized. The aim is to gain initial insight into the capability of RELAP5 to simulate the behavior of AP600 safety features. A-loss-of-normal-feedwater event is studied. Of the transients that must be investigated, this transient has been chosen to be one of the most relevant because the response of the AP600 to a loss-of-normal-feedwater event differs significantly from that of current pressurized water reactors in the extensive use of passive safety features peculiar to the AP600. Also, strong interactions among the AP600 safety systems, which should be further analyzed to permit full optimization of the system actuation logic and operation, are shown. Finally, a loss of normal feedwater without reactor scram, performed to investigate short-term plant behavior, shows that the pressure peak is affected by critical discharge flow coefficients applied to the pressurizer safety valves, while a relatively small reduction of the pressure peak is observed when both heat exchangers of the passive heat removal system are operating as opposed to the case in which only one is available. The data used for this study are derived from the Standard Safety Analysis Report configuration of the Westinghouse AP600 as of 1992.