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Division Spotlight
Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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.
Chin-Jang Chang, Chien-Hsiung Lee, Wen-Tang Hong, Lance L. C. Wang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 1 | July 2003 | Pages 65-76
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3398
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A passive core cooling system (PCCS) has been installed at the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research Integral System Test facility. It includes three core makeup tanks (CMTs), three accumulators (ACCs), a four-stage automatic depressurization system (ADS), a passive residual heat removal (PRHR) heat exchanger submerged into an in-containment refueling water storage tank (IRWST). The purpose of this research is to study the performance of the PCCS with passive injection during either a pressure balance line (PBL) break or a direct vessel injection (DVI) line break. Five experiments were performed simulating break area ratios of 0.5 to 2.0% (1.88 to 3.77 mm) at either a PBL or a DVI line. The general system response and the interactions of CMT, ACC, PRHR, and IRWST to the effect of core heat removal are observed and discussed. The experimental results show long-term core cooling can be reached for the cases of the PBL break and the DVI-line break following the PCCS actuation procedures.
