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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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
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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.
P. Mayo, F. Rodenas, J. M. Campayo, A. Pascual, B. Marín, G. Verdú
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 238-242
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) / Radioisotopes | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9133
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this work is to assess the image quality of dental digital systems with computed radiography (phosphor plate) and direct radiography (charge-coupled-device sensor), by developing a specific dental phantom named RADEN and software to analyze the phantom image automatically. The phantom developed to evaluate the image quality of dental radiographic equipment has specific test objects of contrast-detail combinations appropriated for the resolution of the dental digital systems. The image quality is evaluated by using contrast-detail curves and an image quality index. The phantom was made of a square aluminum block 7.5 × 7.5 cm that has a lodge of size 3.2 × 3.2 cm for fixing the sensor of the digital dental system, and it contains specific test objects of contrast-detail combinations that are cylindrical holes. The diameters of the holes ranged from 0.3 to 1.6 mm, and the depths ranged from 0.14 to 1.28 mm; these ranges for the diameters and depths are suitable for resolution of the dental digital systems and the contrast attenuation curves of the X-radiation, and the results are sensitive to the operating conditions of the dental radiographic system.We have also developed specific software to analyze the RADEN phantom image automatically obtained by the digital radiographic equipment. The algorithms are based on digital image processing techniques, and they have been implemented in a user-friendly tool with a graphical interface.
