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Division Spotlight
Mathematics & Computation
Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
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.
Jennifer S. Butler, Darvin Kapitz, Robert P. Martin, Farrokh Seifaee, Ramu K. Sundaram
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 244-260
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9462
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
AREVA NP's U.S. EPR is a 4590-MW(thermal) evolutionary pressurized water reactor that incorporates proven technology with an innovative system architecture to provide an unprecedented level of safety. One of the measures of safety is provided by probability risk assessment (PRA). PRA Level 1 concerns the evaluation of core damage frequency based on various initiating events and the success or failure of various plant event mitigation features. Determination of this measure requires mission success criteria, which are used to build the logic that makes up the fault trees and event trees of the Level 1 PRA. Developing mission success criteria for the wide variety of accident sequences modeled in the PRA Level 1 model requires a large number of thermal-hydraulic calculations. AREVA selected the MAAP4 code to perform these calculations because of its fast computation times relative to more sophisticated thermal-hydraulic codes. This is a unique application of the MAAP4 code, which was developed specifically for severe accident and PRA Level 2 analysis. As such, a study was performed to assess MAAP4's thermal-hydraulic response capabilities against AREVA's S-RELAP5 best-estimate integral systems thermal-hydraulic analysis code.
