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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.
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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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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.
Hilbert Christensen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 124 | Number 2 | November 1998 | Pages 165-174
Technical Paper | Materials for Nuclear Systems | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2916
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculations of UO2-fuel corrosion and gas production from radiolysis of water have been carried out. The calculations simulated conditions of spent-fuel leaching experiments carried out within a European Union project. In some of these experiments, carried out by Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, a fuel pellet was exposed in deionized water for 200 days, and fuel alteration and gas production rates were measured. A radiolysis model, developed previously, was used to calculate the oxidation of UO2 caused by water radiolysis products. The calculated fuel alteration rate was 2.2 × 10-8 mol UO2(g U)-1day-1, about three times higher than the experimental rate, 6.3 × 10-9 mol UO2(g U)-1day-1.The fair agreement between calculated and experimental corrosion rates shows that the model may be used for prediction of corrosion behavior of spent fuel in the repository. The calculated gas generation rates were 2 × 10-8 and 1 × 10-8 mol(g U)-1day-1 for hydrogen and oxygen, respectively, about six times lower than the experimental values.
