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Division Spotlight
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.
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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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.
Gail A. Cordes
Nuclear Technology | Volume 141 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 63-68
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technologies | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3350
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The recognition and analysis of evolving patterns provides a unifying concept for studying and implementing intelligent information processing for open feedback control systems within the nuclear industry. Control is considered as influence of a large system to achieve the goals of the human (who might or might not be part of an open feedback loop) and is not limited to operation of a component within a nuclear power plant. The intelligent control system includes open logic and can automatically react to new data in an unprogrammed way. This application of evolving patterns integrates current research developments in human cognition and scientific semiotics with traditional feedback control. A preliminary implementation of such a system using existing computational techniques is postulated, and tools that are lacking at this time are identified. Proof-of-concept applications for the nuclear industry are referenced.
