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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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.
Yasuteru Sibamoto, Yutaka Kukita, Hideo Nakamura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 139 | Number 3 | September 2002 | Pages 205-220
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3314
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The dynamic plunging behavior of a subcooled water jet into a pool of molten lead-bismuth alloy, visualized and measured using high-frame-rate neutron radiography, is described. It is shown that the interactions between water and heavy melt in this geometry differ in several aspects from those in melt injection into water investigated extensively in relation to fuel-coolant interactions. The maximum depth of jet penetration is limited by the buoyancy on and the onset of bulk boiling in the water which has collected in a "cavity." The bulk boiling starts as the subcooled water supply to the cavity becomes limited due to pinching instabilities in the upper region of the cavity. This leads to a transition to the final steady state.