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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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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. Trotignon, P. Thouvenot, I. Munier, B. Cochepin, E. Piault, E. Treille, X. Bourbon, S. Mimid
Nuclear Technology | Volume 174 | Number 3 | June 2011 | Pages 424-437
Technical Paper | TOUGH2 Symposium / Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11750
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Simulations of atmospheric carbonation of concrete intermediate-low level waste cell components were conducted to evaluate potential chemical degradations affecting these components during the operating period of a radioactive waste repository in a deep Callovo-Oxfordian clay layer. Two-phase liquid water-air flow is combined with gas components diffusion processes, leading to a progressive drying of the concrete and an array of chemical reactions affecting the cement paste. The carbonation process depends strongly on the progression of the drying front inside the concrete, which in turn is sensitive to the initial water saturation and to nonlinear effects associated with permeability and tortuosity phenomenological laws.Results obtained with a modified version of ToughReact-EOS4 to represent realistic tortuosity evolution of materials with clogging and saturation are presented and commented upon. Strong porosity clogging of the carbonated concrete is not observed in the simulations; slight porosity opening is in general predicted, except for high initial liquid saturation of the concrete, in which case a moderate porosity reduction is found. Carbonation depths on the order of 0.6 to 1.1 × 10-3 myr-1 are predicted for cementitious components. However, these values are probably overestimations both in depth and intensity of carbonation. The model of cement drying needs some revision to correctly weight diffusion control in the discretized representation of the cement/air boundary. Also, the kinetic model of mineral reactivity needs improvements with respect to the influence of liquid saturation on reaction rates, which are actually strongly decreased in dry materials, and with respect to the protective effect of secondary carbonates.
