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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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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.
Y. J. Chung, S. H. Yang, H. K. Kim, M. K. Chung, K. K. Kim
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 1 | January 2009 | Pages 32-42
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4060
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experiment on a heat transfer and a natural-circulation performance for an integral-type reactor have been carried out using the VISTA facility, and the calculated results using the TASS/SMR and MARS codes have been compared with the experimental results. The VISTA is an experimental facility that consists of a primary system, a secondary system, and a passive residual heat removal system (PRHRS), to simulate the SMART (SysteM integrated modular Advanced ReacTor) plant. The experimental results show that the fluid is stabilized well in the primary system and the PRHRS under natural-circulation conditions. The TASS/SMR and MARS codes predict the overall characteristics of the natural circulation in the primary system and the PRHRS well. From the calculation results, most of the heat transferred from the primary system is removed at the PRHRS heat exchanger by a condensation heat transfer. Under natural-circulation conditions in the integral reactor, a smoothing function at the transition region between different heat transfer modes will be adopted in the TASS/SMR code and a pressure-loss model needs to be improved on the cross-flow bundle geometry in the MARS code.
