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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.
S. X. Li, D. Vaden, B. R. Westphal, G. L. Frederickson, R. W. Benedict, T. A. Johnson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 166 | Number 2 | May 2009 | Pages 180-186
Technical Papers | Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A7404
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An engineering-scale pyroprocessing integrated efficiency test was conducted with sodium-bonded, spent Experimental Breeder Reactor II drive fuel elements. The major pieces of equipment used to conduct the test were the element chopper, Mk-IV electrorefiner, cathode processor, and casting furnace. Four batches of the spent fuel (containing 50.4-kg heavy metal) were processed under a set of fixed operating parameters. The primary goal of the test was to demonstrate the actinide dissolution and recovery efficiencies typical of the fixed operating parameters that have been developed for this equipment based on over a decade's worth of processing experience. The total mass balance for the test was 101.28% (slightly more output than input). The uranium mass balance for the test was 100.13%. The test results indicate that 99.3 wt% of uranium in the feed was electrochemically dissolved and 98.4 wt% of the uranium was collected as metal ingots. The complexity of zirconium behavior during electrorefining was confirmed by the test results. More than 85 wt% of the zirconium was electrochemically dissolved during the later stages of the electrorefining process. However, only 33.7 wt% of the zirconium was collected as metal in the ingots. The balance of the zirconium is believed to reside in the cadmium pool. The test also identified that the dross streams from the cathode processor and casting furnace account for ~2.4 wt% of the uranium relative to the feed.