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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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.
T. F. Nichols, L. W. Townsend, J. W. Hines
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 178-181
Dose/Dose Rate | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 1) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9122
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dose from solar particle events (SPEs) poses a serious threat to the health of astronauts. A method for forecasting the rate and total severity of such events would give time for the astronauts to take actions to mitigate the effects from an SPE. The danger posed from an SPE depends both on the total dose received and the temporal profile of the event. The temporal profile describes how quickly the dose will arrive. Previously developed methods used neural networks to predict the total dose from an event. Later, the ability to predict the temporal profiles was added to the neural network approach. Localized weighted regression (LWR) was then used to determine if better fits with less computer load could be accomplished. Previously, LWR was shown to be able to predict the total dose from an event. LWR is the model being used to forecast the dose and the temporal profile from an SPE. LWR is a nonparametric memory-based technique; it compares a new query to stored sets of exemplar data to make its predictions. It is able to forecast early in an SPE the dose and dose rate for the event. For many events the total dose is predicted within a factor of 2 within 20 min of the beginning of the event. SPEs that are within the training parameters have temporal predictions within a few hours of the start of the event. Using an LWR model, forecasts of the dose and dose rate can be made a few hours after the start of the event. The model is able to forecast most types of events within [approximately]10% accuracy. However, there are a few events that the model fails to forecast accurately.