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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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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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.
Yoshinori Ueda, Junichi Ishii, Shiro Matsumoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 144 | Number 3 | December 2003 | Pages 358-368
Technical Paper | Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3450
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A deviation in the operational condition of a mixer settler and a centrifugal contactor causes an entrainment or an overflow, which affects the concentration profile. Although there has been no quantitative study about the effect of such abnormal flows on the concentration profile, the occurrence of such abnormal flows has been severely restricted for a PUREX flow sheet. However, the restriction of abnormal flows can be relaxed when the effect of such flows is limited within the allowable range such that the concentration of the product does not deviate from its specification. This relaxation could serve to benefit a continuous operation under a certain degree of deviation from the operational condition and a smaller design load of a solvent extractor. From this viewpoint, the relationship between the magnitude of abnormal flows and the effect of them on the process was studied quantitatively using a specially developed code in a wide range of PUREX flow sheet conditions, and the possibility of this relaxation was investigated. The results showed that the effect of the abnormal flow on the concentration in the organic outflow or aqueous raffinate was dominated by the leakage fraction under normal conditions regardless of each specific flow sheet condition. The common correlations were found between the leakage fraction of uranium and plutonium under the occurrence of abnormal flows and that under no abnormal flow for the stripping and extracting conditions, respectively. Comparing the given correlations and the usual specification of the leakage fraction of uranium and plutonium suggested that the restriction of the abnormal flows could be relaxed for a usual PUREX flow sheet.