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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.
L. K. Heung
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 859-864
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-A30512
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the new Replacement Tritium Facility (RTF) at the Savannah River Site, gloveboxes and stripper systems are used to minimize tritium release to the environment. The RTF was built to handle kilogram levels of tritium. It was started up and has been in operation since January 1994. The glovebox-stripper system has performed well in confining tritium leaks from the process. The tritium level in the gloveboxes has been maintained at below 0.1 Ci/m3 under normal conditions. During a large leak of tritium gas from the process to a glovebox, the tritium concentration in the glovebox shot up to about 4000 Ci/m3. However, there was no significant release of tritium to the environment. The tritium reading in the glovebox decreased to a 10 Ci/m3 level after 6 days of stripping. The performance of the glovebox-stripper system during this tritium leak and the possible factors for the long and slow decay of the tritium concentration in the glovebox are discussed in this paper.
