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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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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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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.
A. Bruggeman, M. Snykers, P. De Regge, M.J. Embrechts
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 14 | Number 2 | September 1988 | Pages 828-832
Tritium Properties and Interactions with Material | Proceedings of the Third Topical Meeting on Tritium Technology in Fission, Fusion and Isotopic Applications (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 1-6, 1988) | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25237
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the Aqueous Self-Cooled Blanket (ASCB) concept, an aqueous 6Li solution in a metallic structure is used as a fusion reactor shielding-breeding blanket. Radiolysis effects could be very important for the design and the use of an ASCB. Although many aspects of the radiation chemistry of water and dilute aqueous solutions are now reasonably well understood, it is not possible to predict the radiochemical behaviour of the concentrated candidate ASCB solutions quantitatively. However, by means of a worst case calculation for a possible ASCB for the Next European Torus (NET) it is shown that even with an important rate of water decomposition the ASCB concept is still workable. Gas bubbles and explosive mixtures can be avoided by increasing the pressure in the neutron irradiated zone and by extracting and/or recombining the radiolytically produced hydrogen and oxygen. This could require an additional inert gas loop, which could also be used as part of the tritium extraction installation.
