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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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
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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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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.
Stanislav P. Uryasev, Pranab K. Samanta
Nuclear Technology | Volume 116 | Number 2 | November 1996 | Pages 245-256
Technical Paper | Reactor Operation | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35304
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Failure-dependent testing implies a test of redundant components (or trainsj when the failure of one component has been detected. The purpose of such testing is to detect any common-cause failures (CCFs) of multiple components so that a corrective action, such as repair or plant shutdown, can be taken to reduce the residence time of multiple failures. This type of testing focuses on reducing the conditional risk of CCFs. Formulas are developed for calculating the conditional failure probability of a two-train system with different test, repair, and shutdown strategies. A methodology is presented, with an example calculation, showing the risk effectiveness offailure-dependent strategies for emergency diesel generators in nuclear power plants. Four alternative actions after the identification of a failure of one component are analyzed: (a) not carrying out any additional testing, (b) testing the redundant components and shutting down the plant if a CCF is present, (c) emergency repair of the failed component in a given time (less than the allowed outage time), and (d) additional testing of redundant components after the repair of the failed component.
