The consecutive, partly overlapping emergence of expert systems and th
en neural computation methods among intelligent technologies, is refle
cted in the evolving scene of their application to nuclear engineering
. This paper provides a bird's eye view of the state of the applicatio
n in the domain, along with a review of a particular task, the one per
haps economically more important: refueling design in nuclear power re
actors. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.