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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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.
Alexandra Pudewills, Nina Müller-Hoeppe, Reiner Papp
Nuclear Technology | Volume 112 | Number 1 | October 1995 | Pages 79-88
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A15853
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the last few years, several repository concepts have been developed for salt formations to dispose of both high-level radioactive waste from reprocessing and spent-fuel elements. The results of a series of thermal and near-field thermomechanical analyses for disposal in drifts at three horizons of a repository are described. The rise of the temperature in the emplacement area and the surrounding rock, the room closure of access and emplacement drifts during operational time, followed by the long-term compaction of the backfill material and the resulting stresses in rock salt, are investigated. Two numerical modeling procedures were used to obtain the results in this study. A computer code based on the closed-form solution for a heat source in a homogeneous medium was applied to predict the temperatures; a finite-element code, taking into account the nonlinear, temperature- and time-dependent behavior of rock salt and backfill material, was used to investigate the thermomechanical effects.