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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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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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.
Masaumi Nakahara, Tsutomu Koizumi, Kazunori Nomura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 174 | Number 1 | April 2011 | Pages 77-84
Technical Paper | Chemical Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11681
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A crystal purification process consisting of sweating and melt filtration was developed to improve decontamination factors (DFs) of fission product impurities from uranyl nitrate hexahydrate (UNH) crystal recovered from a dissolver solution of irradiated fast reactor core fuel. Batch experiments on the sweating and melt filtration processes were carried out at 56 to 80°C. Although the DFs of solid impurities such as Cs and Ba remain the same in the sweating process, those of liquid impurities such as Zr, Nb, Ru, Ce, and Eu were 2.32, 2.40, 2.50, 2.45, and 2.60 at 60°C. On the other hand, the DF of Pu for the UNH crystal slightly increased to 1.25 at 60°C. Because Pu incorporated the UNH crystal in both the solid impurities such as Cs2Pu(NO3)6 and in the liquid impurities, Pu in the liquid fraction was removed by the sweating operation. Decontamination of liquid impurities was effective with sweating time and with a rise in sweating temperature. In the melt filtration process, 0.45- to 5.0-m-diam filters were used for the separation of the molten UNH crystal. The DF of Ba was approximately ten times as high as the crude crystal with 0.45- to 5.0-m-diam filters. The particle size of Pu and Cs formed as Cs2Pu(NO3)6 was quite small. As a proof of this, although the decontamination of Pu and Cs was not effective with a 5.0-m-diam filter, their DFs rose 2.7 times using a 0.45-m-diam filter.