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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
Meeting Spotlight
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
Standards Program
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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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.
C. Saville, G. Ascione, S. Elwood, A. Nagy, S. Raftopoulos, R. Rossmassler, J. Stencel, D. Voorhees, C. Tilson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 1078-1082
Analysis and Accountancy | 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-A30550
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requires control and accountability of nuclear materials for all DOE-owned nuclear materials at licensed and licensed-exempt facilities. Through a series of DOE orders (5633. 3 and associated referenced series), the DOE has set forth minimum requirements and procedures for control and accountability of nuclear materials. The TFTR has been in deuterium-tritium (D-T) operations since November 1993 utilizing DOE-owned tritium for fueling the plasma reaction. As a result of the current D-T experiments at TFTR, 30 grams of tritium have been shipped to PPPL, tracked through the tritium storage and delivery systems, processed as scrap or waste, and shipped back to other DOE-owned facilities for disposal or reprocessing. Under the guidance of the DOE control and accountability orders, PPPL is required to implement and maintain a program that includes the establishment of nuclear material balance areas, material surveillance, calibration and verification of measurement devices, graded safeguards for protection of tritium inventories, computerized tracking of measurement control points, material balance reports, shipper/receiver evaluations, and extensive DOE reporting requirements. This paper discusses the program (PPPL Material Control and Accountability Plan) that has been implemented to track DOE-owned tritium and all other accountable source material. Specifically, this paper details the methods used to measure tritium in various systems at TFTR, resolve inventory differences, perform inventory by difference inside the Tokamak, process and measure plasma exhaust and other effluent gas streams, process, measure and ship scrap or waste tritium on molecular sieve beds, and detail the organizational structure of the Material Control and Accountability (MC&A) group. In addition, this paper describes a Unix™ based computerized software system developed at PPPL to account for all tritium movements throughout the facility.