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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.
Daniel R. Tinkler, Thomas J. Downar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 3 | June 2003 | Pages 230-242
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-47
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A 200-MW(electric) simplified boiling water reactor (SBWR) was designed and analyzed under sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Research Initiative program. The compact size of a 200-MW(electric) reactor makes it attractive for countries with a less well developed engineering infrastructure, as well as for developed countries seeking to tailor generation capacity more closely to the growth of their electricity demand. The 200-MW(electric) core design reported here is based on the 600-MW(electric) General Electric SBWR core, which was first analyzed in the work performed here in order to qualify the computer codes used in the analysis. Cross sections for the 8 × 8 fuel assembly design were generated with the HELIOS lattice physics code, and core simulation was performed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission codes RELAP5/PARCS. In order to predict the critical heat flux, the Hench-Gillis correlation was implemented in the RELAP5 code. An equilibrium cycle was designed for the 200-MW(electric) core, which provided a cycle length of more than 2 yr and satisfied the minimum critical power ratio throughout the core life.
