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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
Hans-Jürgen Engelmann
Nuclear Technology | Volume 121 | Number 2 | February 1998 | Pages 148-161
Technical Paper | German Direct Disposal Project | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2827
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In its resolution of January 1, 1985, the federal government of Germany deemed it necessary to develop, complementary to reprocessing, the direct disposal of spent fuel. The Deutsche Gesellschaft zum Bau und Betrieb von Endlagern für Abfallstoffe was in charge of the implementation of demonstration tests aimed at proving the state of engineering readiness and planning of different repository concepts.Several repository alternatives (borehole emplacement, drift emplacement) including different waste packages, cooling times, and technical equipment, etc., were compared. As a result, a reference and a backup concept were elaborated and subsequently examined in detail. Temperature calculations were carried out for a site-independent case and for a case using the working model of the Gorleben salt dome, which displays a horizontal cut of the geological structure of the salt dome.The demonstration tests were intended for confirming technical feasibility under realistic conditions. They comprised simulation tests for shaft transport of heavy loads, handling tests of drift disposal, and active handling experiments with neutron sources.
