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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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.
Shelly X. Li, Steven D. Herrmann, Michael F. Simpson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 171 | Number 3 | September 2010 | Pages 292-299
Technical Paper | Pyro 08 Special / Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A10864
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of a recently reported series of bench-scale actinide recovery experiments with liquid cadmium cathodes (LCCs) are subjected to a more detailed analysis in this paper. It is suggested that separation efficiency (SE), not separation factor (SF), should be used to assess the effectiveness of an LCC to separate actinides from rare earth (RE) elements. The common definition of SF for any pair of actinide and RE elements in the molten salt/liquid Cd system is the ratio of their distribution coefficients, which are measured under equilibrium conditions. The definition of SE is broader than that of SF. For any pair of actinide and RE elements in the molten salt/liquid Cd system, SE is the ratio of their distribution coefficients, such as SEPu-U = DPu/DU, where DPu and DU are measured at either equilibrium or nonequilibrium conditions. The relationship of SE with SF is linear and can be expressed as SEPu-U = DPu/DU and DPu = SFPu-UDU + b. When DPu and DU are measured under equilibrium conditions, SE is equal to SF.The physical or chemical meaning of the intercept b is not clear. From a mathematical point of view, the absolute values of b reveal the differences between the measured DPu/DU or SE and SF. The negative values of b indicate that the SE measurement results are smaller than the associated SF. The values of b may be used to evaluate the SE of LCC on electrochemically recovered actinides from fission product elements. An electrochemical model was developed to investigate the mechanism of RE contamination of the actinides collected by the LCC. It was confirmed that REs were electrochemically transported into the Cd phase. A more negative LCC voltage has a stronger impact on the quantities of REs transported into the Cd than those of the actinides.
