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Division Spotlight
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.
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.
M. Brugger, D. Forkel-Wirth, S. Roesler
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 665-669
Accelerators | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9286
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The FLUKA code is used to simulate the residual dose rates around a typical beam absorber considering various scenarios. The latter include carbon, copper, and tungsten as jaw materials, different beam energies, protons, and lead ion beams as well as different irradiation and cooling times. Using the dose rate maximum close to the absorber surface, the study investigates the cooling time dependence for the different scenarios. It is found to be similar for all jaw materials and beam energies. The dose rate scales with energy as E0.83 and with the number of nucleons when comparing proton beam with lead ions. After a sufficiently long cooling time, a few radionuclides produced in the steel tank, such as 56Co, 58Co, 48V, and 54Mn, dominate the dose rate. The study can be easily extended to other materials or irradiation scenarios and can be applied to first evaluations of given accelerator design options.
