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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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.
Robert B. Hayes
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 35-40
Detectors | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 1) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9097
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes an algorithm intended for use in the U.S. Navy's next-generation air particle detector designed for measuring 60Co air contamination. The algorithm measures both alpha and beta activity from an air filter utilizing passivated implanted planar silicon detectors for spectrometry of both particle types and is designed to compensate for radon progeny to discriminate this from the beta emissions of 60Co. This is done by correlating the specific alpha emissions with their beta emission parents, or their beta emission progeny, as appropriate. In addition, the algorithm is unique in that by using region of interest (ROI) windows, it is less sensitive to spectral smearing due to dust or humidity effects on the particle depositions or more specifically to variable energy loss of alpha particles to the detector from deposited material on the filter. A weakness of this approach is that thoron B (212Pb) does not have a detectable alpha parent and the next alpha progeny must decay through an isotope (212Bi) with a half-life of 60.6 min. This causes predictions of the 212Pb activity to lag in time to some extent. Mitigation of this effect is realized by using a first-order correction utilizing appropriate mathematical equations to account for the physics of this buildup and decay. This paper concludes by demonstrating that the beta assay value is a linear superposition of the alpha ROI values from the three dominant alpha peaks. Initial estimates on the coefficients of the alpha ROI values are derived with final values recommended to be determined from operational measurements.