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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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.
Carl A. Beard, John J. Buksa, Michael W. Cappiello, J. Wiley Davidson, Jay S. Elson, John R. Ireland, Robert A. Krakowski, Burt J. Krohn, William C. Sailor, Joseph L. Sapir
Nuclear Technology | Volume 111 | Number 1 | July 1995 | Pages 122-132
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35151
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A conceptual target and blanket design for an accelerator transmutation of waste system capable of transmuting the high-level waste stream from 2.5 light water reactors is described. Typically, four such targetblanket designs would be served by a single linear accelerator. The target consists of rows of solid tungsten rod bundles, cooled by heavy water and surrounded by a lead annulus. The annular blanket, which surrounds the target, consists of a set of actinide-oxide-slurrybearing tubes, each 3 m long, surrounded by heavy water moderator. Heat is removed from the slurry tubes by passing the slurry through an external heat exchanger. Long-lived fission products are burned in regions that are separate from the actinides. Using the Monte Carlo codes LAHET and MCNP, a conceptual design for a beam current of 62.5 mA/target of 1.6-GeV protons has been developed. Preliminary engineering analyses on key system components have been performed. A preliminary layout of the concept and the associated primary-heat transport subsystems was developed, demonstrating a multiple-containment-boundary design philosophy.
