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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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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.
Tetsuo Sawada, Hisashi Ninokata, Hirofumi Tomozoe, Hiroshi Endo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 3 | June 2000 | Pages 242-251
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT130-242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An outline is given of simple evaluation models for a recriticality in an attempt to construct a fast reactor core that has high potential to terminate an accident and prevent its progression, under postulated core-damage conditions, into further disruption of the degraded core and into possible recriticality leading to an energetic power excursion. The basic idea to prevent recriticality events is to remove a certain amount of fuel material out of the core in order to keep the core subcritical. Based on the simplified models, general guidelines are given that minimize the amount of fuel removal necessary to avoid recriticality events. Multigroup two-dimensional diffusion calculations are also performed to ascertain the tendency obtained by the simple model for the reactivity insertion due to a core collapse. In the sense of controlled material relocation, the fraction of core materials is identified that should be preferentially removed out of the core to eliminate the recriticality potential.