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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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.
Abdellatif M. Yacout, Stefano Salvatores, Yuri Orechwa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 2 | February 1996 | Pages 177-189
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35187
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Failure times of components are traditionally used to evaluate their reliability. An alternate approach is to analyze the degradation data accumulated during the component’s testing or during its normal operation. Degradation analysis is particularly useful when it is not possible to observe a significant number of failures. This is the case for metallic Integral Fast Reactor fuel pins irradiated in Experimental Breeder Reactor II, where failures have not taken place under normal operating conditions. A degradation analysis methodology is presented and applied to these pins. The time-to-failure distribution for the fuel pins is estimated based on a fixed threshold failure model. The confidence intervals of the distribution are calculated using a parametric bootstrap method.