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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.
Kazuhiro Sawa, Isao Murata, Shusaku Shiozawa, Mikio Matsumoto
Nuclear Technology | Volume 106 | Number 3 | June 1994 | Pages 265-273
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34957
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, a small amount of fission products (FPs) are released from fuel elements during normal operation, and condensable FPs plate out on the inner surface of primary cooling system components. In a depressurization accident, plated out FPs would be forced to reentrain or lift off by chemical and/or mechanical forces. The amount of liftoff FPs is important because they have a potential hazard of radiation exposure to the environment. In order to investigate the behavior of FPs under the rapid depressurization condition caused by a large-scale pipe rupture accident, blow down, wipe off, and leaching tests were carried out. It is observed that the liftoff of plated out FPs is caused not only by desorption but also by mechanical phenomena such as break of microstructure on the metal surface in the rapid depressurization condition. Then, it is considered that the liftoff fraction would depend on the fraction of migration of FPs into the oxide film or base metal.