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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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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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.
Bassam I. Shamoun, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 115 | Number 1 | July 1996 | Pages 35-45
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35273
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental observation has shown that the assumption of complete fuel fragmentation in a vapor explosion by the shock adiabatic thermodynamic model results in predicting upper bounds for the shock pressure, propagation velocity, and work output. This model has been modified by considering the condition where the assumption of complete fragmentation of the fuel is relaxed. A methodology is adopted using experimental values of the shock pressure and propagation velocity to estimate the initial mixture conditions of the experiment and the mass fraction of the materials participating in the explosion. Analysis of a steady-state subcritical vapor explosion in one dimension has been carried out by applying the conservation laws of mass, momentum, and energy and the appropriate equation of state for a homogeneous mixture of molten tin and water. The KROTOS-21 experiment, conducted at the Joint Research Center at Ispra, Italy, was used as the initial benchmark experiment in this analysis. A quasisteady explosion pressure of ∼3 MPa and a propagation velocity of ∼200 m/s were obtained in this experiment. Using this model, the estimated minimum mass of the fragmented fuel was found to be 0.21 kg (3.2%) of the total mass of the fuel. The predicted work output by this model corresponding to the aforementioned fragmented fuel mass was found to be 9.8 kJ. The estimated initial void fraction of the vapor was found to be 11.5%. In these analyses, a comparison is made of the various possible closure relations applied to the detonation wave theory for a vapor explosion and associated concerns of model stability in the two-phase region.