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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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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. Lamart, C. Robert, E. Blanchardon, A. Molokanov, X. Lechaftois, D. Broggio, A. Desbrée, D. Franck
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 220-226
Phantoms | 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-A9129
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Although great efforts have been made to improve the physical anthropomorphic phantoms used to calibrate in vivo measurement systems, each of these phantoms represents a single average counting geometry and usually contains a uniform distribution of a radionuclide in the tissue substitute. As a matter of fact, significant corrections must be made to phantom-based calibration factors in order to obtain absolute calibration efficiencies applicable to a given individual. The OEDIPE software has been developed at the Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety. It allows the direct and fast construction of a voxel phantom from medical images with a realistic distribution of activity between organs and its conversion into computer files to be used online for Monte Carlo calculations. OEDIPE allows determining and visualizing the variation of activity retention in the segmented organs of the phantom and running MCNPX with these calculated source-organs at different times after intake. The influence of the biokinetics of radionuclides on the in vivo measurement as well as the uncertainty on the estimated activity is quantified by comparing the numerical calibration coefficients obtained by considering realistic and dynamic biokinetic distributions of activity with the counting efficiency commonly obtained from simple, homogeneous, and static activity distributions in organs or in the whole body. As an application, the effect of long-term retention tissues was studied through a case of inhalation of an insoluble compound where the thoracic lymph nodes make a significant contribution to the lung counting efficiency. Future work will concern contamination through other routes of intake, such as a wound, and mixtures of radionuclides.