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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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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.
J. A. Blink, G. P. Lasche
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 1146-1151
Environment and Safety | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A23013
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Five steels (PCA, HT-9, thermally stabilized 2.25 Cr-1 Mo, Nb stabilized 2.25 Cr-1 Mo, and 2.25 Cr-1 V) are compared as a function of time from the viewpoints of activation, afterheat, inhalation biological hazard potential (BHP), ingestion BHP, and feasibility of disposal by shallow land burial. An additional case uses the 2.25 Cr-1 V steel with a liquid metal wall (LMW) protective shield between the neutron source and the wall. (This geometry is feasible for inertial confinement fusion reactors.) The PCA steel is the worst choice and the LMW protected 2.25 Cr-1 V is the best choice by substantial margins from all five viewpoints. The HT-9 and two versions of 2.25 Cr-1 Mo are roughly the same at intermediate values. The 2.25 Cr-1 V has about the same afterheat as those three steels, but its waste disposal feasibility is considerably better. Under NRC's proposed low level waste disposal rule (10CFR61), only the 2.25 Cr-1 V could be considered low level waste suitable for shallow land burial.
