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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
W. S. Yeung, J. Shirkov
Nuclear Technology | Volume 114 | Number 1 | April 1996 | Pages 141-145
Technical Note | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35230
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An analysis of an anomaly in the subcooled critical flow model in the RELAP5/MOD3 computer code is presented. Specifically, the code produces a discontinuity in going from unchoked subcooled liquid flow (i.e., subsonic flow) to subcooled choked flow (i.e., sonic flow). The same anomaly has been reported elsewhere. The root cause for this anomaly has been analyzed, and it is found that the user-supplied junction loss coefficient and discharge coefficient play an important role in the occurrence of this anomaly. The analysis is verified by assessment against a test problem simulating single-phase liquid flow through a convergent nozzle with a fixed upstream pressure and a varying downstream pressure. A corrective measure to eliminate the discontinuity is suggested.
