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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.
Ahmad K. Al-Basheer, Glenn E. Sjoden, Monica Ghita
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 906-918
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 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9326
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
For low-energy photons, charged-particle equilibrium usually exists within the patient treatment volume, in which case the photon absorbed dose D is equal to the collisional kerma Kc; however, this is not true for the dose buildup region near the surface of the patient or at interfaces of dissimilar materials, such as tissue/lung, where corrections for secondary electron transport may be significant. This is readily treated in Monte Carlo codes, yet difficult to treat explicitly in deterministic codes due to the large optical thicknesses and added numerical complexities in reaching convergence in photon-electron transport problems. To properly treat three-dimensional electron transport physics deterministically, yet still achieve reasonably fast and accurate whole-body computation times using high-energy photons, angular-energy-dependent transport "electron dose kernels" (EDK-SN) have been developed. These kernels were derived via full physics Monte Carlo electron transport simulations and are applied using scaling based on rapid deterministic photon solutions over the problem phase-space, thereby accounting for the dose from charged-particle electron transport. As a result, accurate whole-body doses may be rapidly achieved for high-energy photon sources by performing a single deterministic SN multigroup photon calculation on a parallel cluster with PENTRAN, then linking the SN-derived photon fluxes and net currents to Monte Carlo-based EDKs to account for a full physics dose. Water phantom results using a uniform 0- to 8-MeV step uniform beam indicate that the dose can be accurately obtained within the uncertainty of a full physics Monte Carlo simulation. Followup work will implement this method on phantoms.
