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Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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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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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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.
Penzhorn R.-D., Berndt U., Kirste E., Hellriegel W., Jung W., Pejsa R., Romer O.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 723-731
Tritium Processing | Proceedings of the Fifth Topical Meeting on Tritium Technology in Fission, Fusion, and Isotopic Applications Belgirate, Italy May 28-June 3, 1995 | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30490
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
During commissioning of the PETRA facility all components were tested singly and sequentially using hydrogen isotopes (incl. up to 1.3 g tritium as DT) and relevant impurities. The operation of the facility in conjunction with the required infrastructure systems of the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK) was also demonstrated. To characterize the PETRA PdAg permeator hydrogen break-through curves for H2, De2 and DT as well as He break-through curves for various H2/D2/He gas mixtures were determined at 300 and 400 °C. A suitable method was developed to verify the mechanical integrity of the permeator during runs with tritium. The H2 and D2 permeation losses into the isolation vacuum of the permeator were quantified and compared with model calculations. Hydrogen permeation into the isolation vacuum could be kept at levels low enough to permit an undisturbed continuous operation of the permeator using a ZrCo tritium storage vessel. All pumps and pump combinations were examined with respect to the achievable vacua and compression ratios employing relevant gases and their mixtures. Loop-integrated infrared analysis of high signal and background stability is used to verify the integrity of the permeator and to study the possible occurrence of radiochemical reactions in the gas phase. It was shown that the ZrCo tritium storage vessel of the PETRA facility can be employed avantageously for the handling of tritium when used in combination with a Normetex scroll pump (18 m3/h)/Siemens metal bellows double stage compressor pump sequence. With this combination it is possible to extract at < 320 °C > 98 % of the hydrogen isotopes from the ZrCo storage vessel with a) negligible permeation losses, b) without the danger of disproportionation of the intermetallic compound and c) with minimization of the tritium inventory in the facility.
