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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
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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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
Alex Stojimirovic, Saurin Majumdar
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 23 | Number 3 | May 1993 | Pages 309-315
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST93-A30158
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermomechanical contact between beryllium cubes and Type 316 stainless steel was analyzed for various values of applied pressure normal to the interface. If we neglect the influence of gap on the interface resistance, finite element analyses show that a simple one-dimensional analysis can lead to serious underestimation of the maximum temperature of the beryllium. A two-dimensional analysis underpredicts the maximum gap created at the interface, compared with a full three-dimensional analysis. Thus, it also significantly underpredicts the maximum temperature of the beryllium.
