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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
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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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.
Steven E. Aumeier, John C. Lee, Derek M. Cribley, William R. Martin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 108 | Number 3 | December 1994 | Pages 299-319
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35014
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present a new time-based cross-section parameterization scheme that allows for a more accurate global depletion analysis than current methodologies without requiring major modifications to existing codes. The new cross-section parameterization scheme makes use of few-group macroscopic cross sections calculated as a function of time at several different power levels. These cross sections are block ordered by time rather than exposure to allow for the explicit representation of instantaneous control, i.e., soluble boron concentration, and thus accurate isotopic history, within the base cross-section library. The scheme is applied to a global depletion analysis of the Slightly Enriched Spectral-Shift Reactor, an advanced converter reactor based on a pressurized water reactor design, using the CPM-2 assembly-level collision probability code and the UM2DB two-dimensional diffusion code. The depletion calculation establishes the feasibility and potential advantages of the proposed cross-section parameterization methodology and shows that through a judicious choice of spectral shift control rod withdrawal strategies, it is possible to substantially increase fuel resource utilization via the spectral shift effect while maintaining acceptable power peaking factors.
