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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.
H. P. Nawada, N. P. Bhat, G. R. Balasubramanian
Nuclear Technology | Volume 114 | Number 1 | April 1996 | Pages 97-110
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35226
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To compare and evaluate various fuel cycle options for a 500-MW(electric) fast breeder reactor, the electrorefining process has been examined for reprocessing spent fuel. Making use of an improved thermochemical model, optimum process conditions for electrorefining have been worked out. These conditions are the following: capacity of the electrorefining cell, number of cells, batch size, feed adjustments, sequential operations for recovery of uranium and co-recovery of uranium and plutonium, number of cycles, and timeframe to meet the refueling schedule. The spent fuel is envisaged to undergo reprocessing in three campaigns: (a) the inner core campaign, (b) the outer core campaign, and (c) the blanket and the leftover campaign. Feed adjustments are done by mixing either the spent inner core or the outer core fuels with the blankets. Three product streams with required fuel composition for direct refabrication of the inner core, the outer core, and the blanket fuel subassemblies, respectively, are obtained by certain sequential electrorefining operations. These calculations made for a mixed-oxide fuel core can be easily extended to the metallic core.