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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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.
Yoshitaka Chikazawa, Christopher Grandy
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 3 | March 2009 | Pages 321-332
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4105
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR) is one of the components of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) used to close the fuel cycle. ABR is a sodium-cooled fast reactor that is used to consume transuranic elements resulting from the reprocessing of light water reactor spent nuclear fuel. ABR-1000 [1000 MW(thermal)] is a fast reactor concept created at Argonne National Laboratory to be used as a reference concept for various future trade-offs. ABR-1000 meets the GNEP goals although it uses what is considered base sodium fast reactor technology for its systems and components. One of the considerations of any fast reactor plant concept is the ability to perform fuel-handling operations with new and spent fast reactor fuel. The transmutation fuel proposed as the ABR fuel has a very little experience base, and thus, this paper investigates a fuel-handling concept and potential issues of handling fast reactor fuel containing minor actinides. In this study, two thermal analyses supporting a conceptual design study on the ABR-1000 fuel-handling system were carried out. One analysis investigated passive dry spent fuel storage, and the other analysis investigated a fresh fuel shipping cask. Passive dry storage can be made suitable for the ABR-1000 spent fuel storage with sodium-bonded metal fuel. The thermal analysis shows that spent fast reactor fuel with a decay heat of 2 kW or less can be stored passively in a helium atmosphere. The 2-kW value seems to be a reasonable and practical level, and a combination of reasonably-sized in-sodium storage followed by passive dry storage could be a candidate for spent fuel storage for the next-generation sodium-cooled reactor with sodium-bonded metal fuel. Requirements for the shipping casks for minor actinide-bearing fuel with a high decay heat level are also discussed in this paper. The shipping cask for fresh sodium-cooled-reactor fuel should be a dry type to reduce the reaction between residual moisture on fresh fuel and the sodium coolant. The cladding temperature requirement is maintained below the creep temperature limit to avoid any damage before core installation. The thermal analysis shows that a helium gas-filled cask can accommodate ABR-1000 fresh minor actinide-bearing fuel with 700-W decay heat. The above analysis results revealed the overall requirement for minor actinide-bearing metal fuel handling. The information is thought to be helpful in the design of the ABR-1000 and future sodium-cooled-reactor fuel-handling system.
