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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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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.
John C. Wagner, Douglas E. Peplow, Thomas M. Evans
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 799-809
MC Calculations | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9309
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulating nuclear well-logging devices with Monte Carlo methods is computationally challenging and requires significant variance reduction to compute detector responses with low statistical uncertainties in reasonable lengths of time. The consistent adjoint-driven importance sampling (CADIS) method, which provides consistent source and transport biasing parameters based on a deterministic adjoint (importance) function, has been demonstrated to be very effective for well-logging simulations and other deep-penetration problems. A recent extension to the CADIS method, FW-CADIS (forward-weighted CADIS), is designed to optimize the calculation of several tallies at once by using an adjoint function based on an adjoint source weighted by the inverse of the forward flux. These advanced variance reduction methods have been incorporated and automated into the MAVRIC sequence of SCALE, making them very easy to use. The CADIS and FW-CADIS methods are demonstrated and compared on simple benchmark models of both neutron- and photon-based well-logging devices. Both advanced variance reduction methods offer a substantial reduction in computing time, compared to analog simulation, for these applications.