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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
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.
David A. Petti, Richard R. Hobbins, Donald L. Hagrman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 105 | Number 3 | March 1994 | Pages 334-345
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34934
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental results on fission product and aerosol release during the Power Burst Facility Severe Fuel Damage (SFD) Test 1-4 are examined to determine the composition of aerosols that would be generated during a severe reactor accident. The SFD 1-4 measured aerosol contained significant quantities of volatile fission products (VFPs) (cesium, iodine, tellurium), control materials (silver and cadmium), and structural materials (tin), indicating that fission product release, vaporization of control material, and release of tin from oxidized Zircaloy were all important aerosol sources. On average the aerosol composition is between one-quarter and one-half VFPs (especially cesium), with the remainder being control material (especially cadmium), and structural material (especially tin). Source term computer codes like CORSOR-Mtend to overpredict the release of structural and control rod material relative to fission products by a factor of between 2 and 15 because the models do not account for relocation of molten control, fuel, and structural material during the degradation process, which tends to reduce the aerosol source. Our results indicate that the aerosol generation in a severe reactor accident is intimately linked to the core degradation process. We recommend that these results be used to improve the models in source term computer codes.
