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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.
Kazuo Minato, Hironobu Kikuchi, Kousaku Fukuda, Nobuyuki Suzuki, Hiroshi Tomimoto, Nobu Kitamura, Mitsunobu Kaneko
Nuclear Technology | Volume 106 | Number 3 | June 1994 | Pages 342-349
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A34964
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Internal flaws in the silicon carbide (SiC) coating of fuel particles have been characterized. The internal flaws of the SiC coating were seen as external discolored spots. The porous flaws formed circumferentially during SiC deposition. These flaws may have a harmful effect on the mechanical integrity and the diffusion barrier of the particle. The SiC coating experiments were performed under systematically selected conditions to study the mechanism of flaw formation. The most important factor influencing flaw formation was found to be the mode of particle fluidization. Internal flaws were eliminated from the particles fabricated in a mass-production coater by controlling particle fluidization.
