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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
Douglass L. Henderson, Mohamed E. Sawan, Gregory A. Moses
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 13 | Number 4 | May 1988 | Pages 594-615
Technical Paper | ICF Target | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25137
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Biological dose rate calculations have been performed for a point external to the diode vacuum casing of the proposed Light Ion Fusion Target Development Facility for times following an operational period of 1 month. The primary diode material considered is Type 304LN stainless steel, with an alternative material of Al-6061-T6. Using a realistic pulse-sequence calculation scheme to account for the pulsed operation mode of the facility, it is shown that for both the stainless steel and aluminum diodes the dose rates external to the diode vacuum casing are > 1 rem/h after a 1-day shutdown period. After a 1-week shutdown period, the dose rates have dropped to 90 and 12 mrem/h, respectively.
