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Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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.
Jeffrey E. Woollard, Thomas E. Blue, Nilendu Gupta, Reinhard A. Gahbauer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 115 | Number 1 | July 1996 | Pages 100-113
Technical Paper | Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35279
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Design parameters for an epithermal neutron field for an accelerator-based source of neutrons for boron neutron capture therapy are developed. The parameters that are developed incorporate predicted biological effects in patients’ heads. They are based on an energy-spectrum-dependent neutron normal-tissue relative biological effectiveness and the treatment planning methodology of Gahbauer and his coworkers, which includes the effects of dose fractionation. The neutron field optimization parameters are evaluated for two epithermal neutron fields resulting from an accelerator-based neutron source with two different moderator assemblies. For the two moderator assemblies and moderator thicknesses evaluated, the D2O-Li2CO3 moderator assembly is superior to the BeO-MgO moderator assembly. The absorbed-dose delivered to the tumor for the D2O-Li2CO3 moderator assembly is larger than that for the BeO-MgO moderator assembly for almost all tumor depths. The treatment times for the D2O-Li2CO3 moderator assembly are slightly longer than for the BeO-MgO moderator assembly. However, for a 10-mA proton current, the treatment times for both are reasonable.
