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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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
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.
H. Sørensen, P. Andersen, S. A. Andersen, V. Andersen, A. Nordskov-Nielsen, B. Sass, K.-V. Weisberg
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 6 | Number 2 | September 1984 | Pages 378-383
Technical Paper | Selected papers from the Ninth International Vacuum Congress and the Fifth International Conference on Solid Surfaces (Madrid, Spain, September 26-October 1, 1983) | doi.org/10.13182/FST84-A23209
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A discussion is given of the work done at Risø National Laboratory on the design and construction of deuterium pellet injectors. A pellet injection system made for the TFR tokamak at Fontenay-aux-Roses, Paris is described. 0.12-mg pellets are injected with velocities of around 600–700 m/s through a 5-m long guide tube. Next some of the details of a new light gas gun are given; with this gun, hydrogen pellets are accelerated to velocities above 1400 m/s, deuterium pellets to velocities above 1300 m/s and neon pellets to velocities above 550 m/s. Finally, a new acceleration method where a pellet should be accelerated by means of a magnetically stabilised electrical discharge is discussed, and a set up for measuring of the pellet size by means of a microwave cavity is outlined.
