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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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.
Takehiko Nakamura, Makio Yoshinaga, Makoto Sobajima, Kiyomi Ishijima, Toshio Fujishiro
Nuclear Technology | Volume 108 | Number 1 | October 1994 | Pages 45-60
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35042
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Irradiated boiling water reactor (BWR) fuel behavior under reactivity-initiated accident (RIA) conditions was investigated in the Nuclear Safety Research Reactor (NSRR) of the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. Short test fuel rods, refabricated from a commercial 7 × 7 type BWR fuel rod at a burnup of 26 G Wd/tonne U, were pulse irradiated in the NSRR under simulated cold startup RIA conditions of the BWRs. Thermal energy from 230 J/g fuel (55 cal/g fuel) to 410 J/g fuel (98 cal/g fuel) was promptly subjected to the test fuel rods by pulse irradiation within ∼10 ms. The peak fuel enthalpies are believed to be the same as the prompt energy depositions. The test fuel rods demonstrated characteristic behavior of the irradiated fuel rods under the accident conditions, such as enhanced pellet cladding mechanical interaction (PCMI) and fission gas release. However, all the fuel rods survived the accident conditions with considerable margins. Simulations by the FRAP-T6 code and fresh fuel rod tests under the same RIA conditions highlighted the burnup effects on the accident fuel performance. The tests and the simulation suggested that the BWR fuel would possibly fail by a cladding burst due to fission gas release during the cladding temperature escalation rather than the PCMI under the cold startup RIA conditions of a severe power burst.
