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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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
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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.
Shih-Jen Wang, Chun-Sheng Chien, Suh-Chyn Jeng
Nuclear Technology | Volume 105 | Number 3 | March 1994 | Pages 447-456
Technical Paper | Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34943
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A plant analyzer was developed for the Kuosheng power station, based on the AD-100 peripheral processor system. To analyze a transient from partial power conditions, the initial steady-state conditions must be generated in advance. A self-initialization algorithm for generating the initial partial power conditions has been developed. The initialization of the rated power conditions is performed first. The self-initialization algorithm then simultaneously adjusts important plant variables, such as the reactor power, dome pressure, downcomer level, feedwater temperature, and core flow, to the desired partial power conditions from the rated conditions with the aid of existing plant control systems and four extra control loops. This algorithm was developed and encoded in the Kuosheng plant analyzer. The initialization for a recirculation pump trip test at 68% of rated power demonstrates the success of this algorithm. The initial conditions generated can be saved and used for transient analysis. Tedious and time-consuming trial-and-error initialization procedures are eliminated. This methodology improves the accuracy and consistency of transient calculations for partial power conditions.