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Division Spotlight
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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.
Koichi Okuno, Masayoshi Kawai, Hitoshi Yamada
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 2 | November 2009 | Pages 545-552
Shielding Materials | 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-A9241
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Neutron shielding is very important for neutron facility construction. Concrete is usually used for neutron shielding. Although concrete is inexpensive, massive thickness is required. In the present work, a novel neutron shielding concrete using colemanite rock and peridotite rock was developed. Its shielding performance was evaluated through the transmission experiments by using 252Cf spontaneous fission source and the calculations with the MCNP5 code. The results show that a neutron 1/100 attenuation length of the neutron concrete shield with a typical colemanite content of 10 wt% is shorter by a factor of 1.7 than that of normal concrete. The results show that the shielding performance becomes better when the thickness is still thicker and the incident neutron spectrum is softer.The colemanite-peridotite concrete (neutron shielding concrete) was applied to biological shields of the Versatile High Intensity Total Diffractometer on the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex. Using this concrete permitted a reduction in the thickness of the shielding wall by a maximum of 25 cm compared to the normal concrete and a reduction of the iron in the beam dump.
