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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
Judith A. Bezdecny, Kevin M. Vance, Douglass L. Henderson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 110 | Number 3 | June 1995 | Pages 369-395
Technical Note | Actinide Burning and Transmutation Special / Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35108
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Accelerator Transmutation of (Nuclear) Waste (ATW) project is the substantial reduction in volume of long-lived high-level radioactive waste of the United States in a safe and energy-efficient manner. An evaluation of the ATW concept has four aspects: material balance, energy balance, performance, and cost. An evaluation of the material balance compares the amount of long-lived high-level waste transmuted with the amount and type of waste created in the process. One component of the material balance is the activation of structural materials over the lifetime of the transmutation reactor. A preliminary radioactivity and radioactive mass balance analysis has been performed on four structure regions of the reaction chamber: the tungsten target, the lead annulus, six tubing materials carrying the actinide slurry, and five reaction vessel structural materials. The amount of radioactive material remaining after a 100-yr cooling period for the base-case ATW was found to be 338 kg of radionuclides. The bulk of this material (313 kg) was generated in the zirconium-niobium (Zr-Nb) actinide tubing material. Replacement of the Zr-Nb tubing material with one of the alternative tubing materials analyzed would significantly reduce the short- and long-term radioactive mass produced. The alternative vessel materials Al-6061 alloy, Tenelon, HT-9, and ; Cr-1 Mo and the alternative actinide tubing materials Al-6061 alloy, carbon-carbon matrix, silicon carbide, and Ti-6 Al-4 V qualify for shallow land burial. Alternative disposal options for the base-case structural material Type 304L stainless steel and the actinide tubing material Zr-Nb will need to be considered as neither qualifies for shallow land burial.