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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.
John T. Mihalczo
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 498-508
Technical Paper | Radiation Measurements and General Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12320
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Prompt neutron decay at delayed criticality was measured by Oak Ridge National Laboratory for uranium-reflected highly enriched uranium (HEU) and Pu metal spheres (FLATTOP), for an unreflected Pu metal (4.5% 240Pu) sphere (JEZEBEL) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and for an unreflected HEU metal sphere at Oak Ridge Critical Experiments Facility. The average prompt neutron decay constants from hundreds of Rossi- and randomly pulsed neutron measurements with 252Cf at delayed criticality are as follows: 3.8458 ± 0.0016 × 105 s-1 , 2.2139 ± 0.0022 × 105 s-1 , 6.3126 ± 0.0100 × 105 s-1 , and 1.1061 ± 0.0009 × 106 s-1 , respectively. These values agree with previous measurements by LANL for FLATTOP, JEZEBEL, and GODIVA I as follows: 3.82 ± 0.02 × 105 s-1 for a uranium core; 2.14 ± 0.05 × 105 s-1 and 2.29 × 105 s-1 (uncertainty not reported) for a plutonium core; 6.4 ± 0.1 × 105 s-1 , and 1.1 ± 0.1 × 106 s-1 , respectively, but have smaller uncertainties because of the larger number of measurements. For the FLATTOP and JEZEBEL assemblies, the measurements agree with calculations. Traditionally, the calculated decay constants for the bare uranium metal sphere GODIVA I and the Oak Ridge Uranium Metal Sphere were higher than experimental by [approximately]10%. Other energy-dependent quantities for the bare uranium sphere agree within 1%.