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Division Spotlight
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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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.
Hidemasa Yamano, Yu-Ichi Onoda, Yoshiharu Tobita, Ikken Sato
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 145-165
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4082
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the TPA2 test of the CABRI-RAFT program, which is part of a fast reactor safety study, fuel-to-steel heat transfer characteristics within a molten fuel/steel mixture system have been investigated. This test was performed in the French CABRI reactor and used a test capsule that contained fresh 12.3%-enriched UO2 pellets with embedded stainless steel balls. Following a preheating phase, the capsule was subjected to a transient overpower that resulted in fuel melting and steel vaporization. The observed steel vapor pressure buildup was quite low, which suggested the presence of a mechanism that significantly reduced the fuel-to-steel heat transfer. A detailed experimental data evaluation by SIMMER-III led to one possible interpretation that the steel vaporization at the surface of the steel ball blanketed the steel from the molten fuel.
