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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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.
Masatoshi Kureta, Hajime Akimoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 1 | July 2003 | Pages 89-100
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT143-89
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Critical power experiments were carried out, and the critical power correlation for axially uniformly heated tight bundles has been derived based on the present experimental data and data sets measured by the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory. The shape of the test section simulates the fuel assembly of the reduced-moderation water reactor (RMWR), which is a water-cooled breeder reactor with a core of the tight triangular fuel rod arrangement. The obtained correlation covers the following conditions: channel geometry (triangular arrangement bundle of 7 to 20 rods, 6.6 to 12.3 mm in rod diameter, 1.0- to 2.3-mm gap between rods, 1.37 to 1.8 m in heated length), mass velocity of 100 to 2500 kg/(m2s), inlet quality of -0.2 to 0, pressure of 2 to 8.5 MPa, and radial peaking factor of 0.98 to 1.5, which include uniform, center-peak, and liner transverse heat flux distribution data. An excellent agreement was obtained between the developed correlation and data (371 points) within an error of ±4.6%.