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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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
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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.
Bernd Richter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 121 | Number 2 | February 1998 | Pages 162-167
Technical Paper | German Direct Disposal Project | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2828
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the two German spent-fuel management options envisages the direct (i.e., no reprocessing) final disposal of spent-fuel assemblies from nuclear reactors in a geological repository. The reference repository will be located in a salt dome. The spent fuel will become inaccessible immediately after its emplacement in drifts, and this rules out a retrieval of the nuclear material from the repository. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requires compliance verification by inspection regimes. A safeguards approach has been developed for the German reference disposal concept, which would be applicable today and which would meet the requirements of the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as the recommendations of the 1995 Consultants Meeting on Safeguards for Geological Repositories. It foresees cask verification in the aboveground area (material balance area I) and design information verification in the aboveground and belowground (material balance area II) areas of the repository. Safeguards have to continue even after closure and decommissioning of the repository mine.
