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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
Meeting Spotlight
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
Standards Program
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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May 2025
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.
Dieter Hennig
Nuclear Technology | Volume 126 | Number 1 | April 1999 | Pages 10-31
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2955
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the framework of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) transient analysis project STARS, a boiling water reactor (BWR) stability analysis methodology based on the BWR system code RAMONA3 has been developed. The time series analysis based on parametric mixed autoregressive/moving average models is conducted by a MATLAB code package using the system identification and the signal-processing toolboxes of MATLAB. A short description of the PSI methodology is presented and two aspects of the stability analysis are discussed. First, the physical mechanism underlying the BWR power oscillations from the nonlinear feedback system point of view is discussed, and second, some experiences collected by the analysis of the regional stability phenomenon are presented.