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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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.
Edward J. Waller, Jason T. Brown
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 93-104
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12276
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Handling radioisotope neutron sources may involve exposure to both neutron and gamma fields. Although the field of gamma dosimetry is well developed and reliable, challenges exist with personal neutron dosimetry. A number of gamma and neutron dosimeters were evaluated for their efficacy in providing personal dosimetry for radioisotope source manipulations. A commercial off-the-shelf electronic neutron dosimeter was observed to underestimate total operator dose when manipulating a 252Cf source. In this work, scaling factors were evaluated using both experimental results and Monte Carlo simulations to allow a measured electronic personal gamma dosimeter (EPGD) dose to be used to estimate the total neutron + gamma dose. The recommended scaling factor using an MGP SOR/R EPGD for free-field 252Cf is 18, and for shielded 252Cf the recommended scaling factor is 6. A conservative single scaling factor of 18 is appropriate for personal dosimetry estimates.
