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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.
Alexandra Knapp, Torsten Radon, Karsten Vogt, Georg Fehrenbacher
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 2 | November 2009 | Pages 487-491
Shielding | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 2) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9230
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the next years the Gesellschaft fuer Schwerionenforschung and international partners will realize the new international accelerator Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) for research with heavy ions, radioactive ions, and antiprotons. Two important storage rings of FAIR are the collector ring (CR) and the recycled experimental storage ring (RESR), which are located together in the same building: The CR is optimized for fast cooling of heavy ions and antiprotons, while the RESR is mainly used for accumulation of antiprotons.The concrete shielding for the CR and RESR is presented on the basis of several Monte Carlo simulations for radiation transport with the latest version of the FLUKA code. Extensive shielding calculations had to be done because of diverse beam types including different locations of beam losses. The goal of the simulations is to reveal possible weak points in the shielding and to ensure a dose rate outside the storage rings and in the technical supplies' room to a value of <0.5 Sv/h so that this area is accessible without any restrictions.
