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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.
Takashi Hosoma, Masanori Aritomi, Tsunemichi Kawa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 120 | Number 2 | November 1997 | Pages 121-135
Technical Paper | Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35421
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Bubble shape and excess pressure in dip-tube pressure measurement for density, level, and volume determination of plutonium nitrate solution in a reprocessing and plutonium conversion plant are studied theoretically and experimentally because the excess pressure is a source of error for highly accurate materials accounting. The bubble shape calculated numerically at equilibrium has a convex face above, like the upper part of a torus. The excess pressure is calculated from liquid density, surface tension, and the torus diameter, without the bottom curvature and height of the bubble. The excess pressure reaches a maximum when the torus diameter reaches the inner diameter of the tube. The bubble breaks and excess pressure reaches a minimum just after the bubble surface reaches the outer surface of the tube. The excess pressure is independent of liquid level and bubbling frequency, if the frequency is less than once every 5 s.
