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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.
Yasushi Okano, Akira Yamaguchi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 144 | Number 3 | December 2003 | Pages 388-399
Technical Paper | Miscellaneous | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3453
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Sodium fire safety analysis requires fundamental combustion properties, e.g., heat of combustion, flame temperature, and composition. We developed the GENESYS code for a theoretical investigation of sodium combustion flame.Our principle conclusions on sodium combustion under atmospheric air conditions are (a) the maximum theoretical flame temperature is 1950 K, and it is not affected by the presence of moisture; the uppermost limiting factor is the chemical instability of the condensed sodium-oxide products under high temperature; (b) the main combustion product is liquid Na2O in dry air condition and liquid Na2O with gaseous NaOH in moist air; and (c) the chemical equilibrium prediction of the residual gaseous reactants in the flame is indispensable for sodium combustion modeling.
