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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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.
Michael T. Itamura, Nicholas D. Francis, Jr., Stephen W. Webb, Darryl L. James
Nuclear Technology | Volume 148 | Number 2 | November 2004 | Pages 115-124
Technical Paper | High-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3552
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Yucca Mountain has been designated as the nation's high-level radioactive waste repository, and the U.S. Department of Energy has been approved to apply to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to construct a repository. The temperature and humidity inside the emplacement drift will affect the degradation rate of the waste packages and waste forms as well as the quantity of water available to transport dissolved radionuclides out of the waste canister. Thermal radiation and turbulent natural convection are the main modes of heat transfer inside the drift. This paper presents the result of three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics simulations of a segment of emplacement drift. The model contained the three main types of waste packages and was run at the time that the peak waste package temperatures are expected. Results show that thermal radiation is the dominant mode of heat transfer inside the drift. Natural convection affects the variation in surface temperature on the hot waste packages and can account for a large fraction of the heat transfer for the colder waste packages. The paper also presents the sensitivity of model results to uncertainties in several input parameters. The sensitivity study shows that the uncertainty in peak waste package temperatures due to in-drift parameters is <3°C.