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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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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.
Michitsugu Mori
Nuclear Technology | Volume 148 | Number 1 | October 2004 | Pages 12-24
Technical Paper | RETRAN | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3544
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two advanced boiling water reactors (ABWRs) whose electric output power is 1356 MW have been commercially operated since 1996 and 1997 by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) in Japan. Features of an ABWR are reactor internal pumps (RIPs) placed in the lower plenum and downcomer, peripherally bottom-mounted on the reactor pressure vessel - which should require different modeling from the jet pumps and two recirculation pumps in the primary outer-loop recirculations of BWR-5.Efforts focused on modeling and simulating the ABWR with transient analyses by the point-kinetics model with the local reactivity modified by local importance weighting of the squared nodal power during start-up tests using the RETRAN-3D code, version MOD003 without three-dimensional kinetics. The core and reactor pressure vessel including ten ABWR RIPs and the steam lines were modeled, and simulations were carried out for the cases of the one-pump trip test, the changing-setpoint tests, the main-steam-isolation-valve-closure test, and the generator load rejection test with bypass.The analytical simulation with RETRAN-3D/MOD003 well reproduced the measured data of the ABWR in operation for the RIP trip and the transient tests and could demonstrate its validation for applying to the ABWR with modeling of RIPs.