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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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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June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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May 2025
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.
Michael F. Simpson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 171 | Number 3 | September 2010 | Page 231
doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A10858
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pyroprocessing is a nuclear fuel cycle technology that can be used to separate spent fuel into reusable actinide products and high-level waste streams. It consists of nonaqueous, electrochemical unit operations that typically use molten salt electrolytes operating at high temperatures. It has several advantages relative to aqueous technologies (i.e., PUREX, UREX, and COEX), especially for fast reactors. These benefits include but are not limited to compact space requirements, efficient recycling of metallic fuel, integrated waste processing and fuel fabrication, and unique nuclear material safeguards features. The technology is currently being used to process spent fuel from the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II in the United States, is being readied for BN-800 fuel treatment in Russia, and is being developed for commercial spent-fuel processing in South Korea.
