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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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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May 2025
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.
Wei-Nian Su, Shih-Jen Wang, Show-Chyuan Chiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 150 | Number 3 | June 2005 | Pages 251-262
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Containment flooding is an important strategy for severe accident management of a conventional boiling water reactor (BWR) system. The purpose of this work is to investigate the containment flooding strategy of the Mark-III system after a reactor pressure vessel (RPV) breach. The Kuosheng Power Plant is a typical BWR-6 nuclear power plant (NPP) with Mark-III containment. The Severe Accident Management Guideline (SAMG) of the Kuosheng NPP has been developed based on the BWR Owners Group (BWROG) Emergency Procedure and Severe Accident Guidelines, Rev. 2. Therefore, the Kuosheng NPP is selected as the plant for study, and the MAAP4 code is chosen as the tool for analysis. A postulated specific station blackout sequence for the Kuosheng NPP is cited as a reference case for this analysis. Because of the design features of Mark-III containment, the debris in the reactor cavity may not be submerged after an RPV breach when one follows the containment flooding strategy as suggested in the BWROG generic guideline, and the containment integrity could be challenged eventually. A more specific containment flooding strategy with drywell venting after an RPV breach is investigated, and a more stable plant condition is achieved with this strategy. Accordingly, the containment flooding strategy after an RPV breach will be modified for the Kuosheng SAMG, and these results are applicable to typical Mark-III plants with drywell vent path.
