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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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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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TerraPower begins U.K. regulatory approval process
Seattle-based TerraPower signaled its interest this week in building its Natrium small modular reactor in the United Kingdom, the company announced.
TerraPower sent a letter to the U.K.’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, formally establishing its intention to enter the U.K. generic design assessment (GDA) process. This is TerraPower’s first step in deployment of its Natrium technology—a 345-MW sodium fast reactor coupled with a molten salt energy storage unit—on the international stage.
Ser Gi Hong, Nam Zin Cho
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 132 | Number 1 | May 1999 | Pages 65-77
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE99-A2049
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new transport theory method of characteristic direction probabilities (CDP), which can treat complicated geometries with computational efficiency, is presented. In the method, the entire problem is divided into subsystems or cells that are further subdivided into finer mesh regions (i.e., computational meshes). Within a subsystem or cell, the fine meshes are coupled by the directional transmission and collision probabilities for each characteristic direction. In other words, all fine meshes in a subsystem are not coupled together but only the fine meshes along the characteristic line are coupled for each direction. This is in contrast to the traditional collision probability methods (CPMs). To calculate the directional probabilities, ray tracing with the macroband concept is performed only on each subsystem type. To couple the subsystems, the angular flux (not the current as in the interface current method) on the interface between the adjacent subsystems is used. Therefore, the method combines the most desirable features of the discrete ordinates methods and those of the integral transport methods. To verify CDP, it is applied to two benchmark problems that consist of complex meshes and is compared with other methods (CPM, method of characteristics, and Monte Carlo method). The results show that CDP gives accurate results with short computing time.