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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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May 2025
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.
Soon Sam Kim, Jerry L. Judd
Nuclear Technology | Volume 110 | Number 1 | April 1995 | Pages 71-85
Fission Reactor | Burnup Credit | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35097
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fission rate monitor measurements and startup testing data recorded during operation of the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) have been used to validate a three-dimensional PDQ full-core model developed for the physics analysis to support an updated final safety analysis report. The three-dimensional analysis utilizes the flux synthesis technique as well as the explicit method in solving for the spatial flux distribution in the core. Measured data used for comparison are specific powers from a string offission rate monitors, located in water channels of individual fuel elements, as well as the lobe and fuel element powers. Good agreement was observed in the specific power comparison. For the overall pointwise data, the mean errors were within 1.6% with a standard deviation of ±9%. An excellent agreement was observed for the fuel element power except for a few fuel positions in the corner lobes. Measured ATR startup testing data are also compared with the PDQ calculated values. The PDQ calculated parameters were conservative with respect to measured data. The validation study provided valuable data for assessment of the three-dimensional analytical model and techniques to be employed in the ATR physics analysis. The study also indicated that the PDQ three-dimensional flux synthesis solution technique is an economical and reasonably accurate method for determining global and local three-dimensional power distributions in the core.
