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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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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.
Hikaru Amano
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 797-802
Tritium Safety | 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-A30502
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Uptake of atmospheric tritiated methane by plants was examined in a preliminary study. Several potted plants which differ in their photosynthetic processes were exposed to tritiated methane in an enclosed chamber. The plants were exposed to a total of 185 MBq of tritium in the form of methane. The methane carrier gas was 630 ppm. The potted plants exposed to tritiated methane included edible Chinese mustards (Komatsuna in Japanese), Indian corns, cactuses. Each pot was covered with a plastic bag to prevent the reaction of methane gas with the potted soil. Only the leaves and branches were exposed to tritiated methane. Tritium was detected in the exposed leaves of C3 and C4 plants, not only in the water soluble form but also in the organically bound tritium form. There seems to be no difference in the transfer mechanism of tritium from methane to C3 and C4 plants. CAM plants which have different photosynthetic processes, did not accumulate HTO. This means that the transfer of tritiated methane to C3 and C4 plants is general phenomena not depending on the difference of the photosynthetic processes among the C3 and C4 plants.