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Division Spotlight
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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.
Kari Rasilainen, Juhani Suksi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 120 | Number 3 | December 1997 | Pages 254-260
Technical Note | Radioisotopes and Isotope | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35416
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The sensitivity of the dating of long-term uranium attachment to bedrock fractures was studied using radioactive dis-equilibria in the natural 238U decay chain. For this purpose, fracture coating samples were taken from the uranium deposit at Palmottu, Finland. A general simulation model was derived for the evolution of the 234U/238U and 230Th/234U disequilibria. Instantaneous, continuous, and multistage uranium accumulation modes were tested to see their effect on the model age. All accumulations produced different, but internally consistent, model ages, except the multistage scenario that yielded a nonunique dating. The simulation model and scenario technique provide a good modeling approach, and the real challenge in uranium-series dating appears to be the quantification of the accumulation rates.
