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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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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.
F. Oriolo, W. Ambrosini, G. Fruttuoso, F. Parozzi, R. Fontana
Nuclear Technology | Volume 112 | Number 2 | November 1995 | Pages 238-249
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35177
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The evaluation of radionuclide transport within a nuclear reactor plant and then to the external environment after an accident that involves severe damage to the fuel rods requires an appropriate evaluation of the thermal-hydraulic conditions that influence both the chemical equilibria among the involved species and the radionuclide retention phenomena. The ENEL Code for the Analysis of Radionuclide Transport (ECART) computer program has been developed for the purpose of unifying reactor coolant and containment system analysis and represents the current state of the art of light water reactor severe accident aerosol codes. New aerosol transport models, like physical resuspension and transport under two-phase flow within the reactor coolant system, are included. The code comprises three modules that deal with aerosol transport, chemical equilibria, and thermal hydraulics, respectively. The recently developed thermal-hydraulic module has been applied to the analysis of transients typically addressed by the code to obtain first indications about the adequacy of the adopted models and about the need for further improvements. A thorough assessment is now needed to achieve confidence in the modeling capabilities of the module. The three modules are presently coupled in the integrated ECART code. The obtained code will be further assessed by application to relevant severe accident scenarios.