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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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.
T. Morita, C. A. Olson, Y. X. Sung, J. F. Connelley, Jr., E. H. Novendstern, S. Kapil, P. W. Rosenthal
Nuclear Technology | Volume 112 | Number 3 | December 1995 | Pages 401-411
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35166
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The AP600 reactor core approaches buoyancy-dominated flow at the departure from nucleate boiling (DNB)-limiting period of a postulated steam-line-break accident. The reactor core has a highly skewed power distribution at this time due to the conservative assumption of a withdrawn rod cluster control assembly (stuck rod). Under such conditions, strong buoyancy-induced core cross flow occurs, and coupled nuclear and thermal-hydraulic interactions become important. To analyze the transient, Westinghouse Electric Corporation has coupled THINC-IV with a neutronic code (ANC). Applicability of the THINC-IV subchannel code to the low-flow conditions with a steep radial power gradient is verified with existing rod bundle test results. The code predictions are in excellent agreement with the test data. The coupled codes provide a realistic three-dimensional simulation of core power by considering core flow distributions and the resultant enthalpy distributions in neutronic feedback. The safety analysis using the coupled code demonstrates that the DNB design basis is met during the postulated steam-line-break accident.
