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Division Spotlight
Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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.
Zhaopeng Zhong, Yousry Gohar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 871-876
Shielding | 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/NT168-871
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Argonne National Laboratory of the United States and Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology of Ukraine have been collaborating on the conceptual design development of an electron accelerator-driven subcritical facility. The facility will be utilized for performing basic and applied nuclear research, producing medical isotopes, and training young nuclear specialists. This paper presents the design and analyses of the biological shield performed for the top section of the facility. The neutron source driving the subcritical assembly is generated from the interaction of a 100-kW electron beam with a natural uranium target. The electron energy is in the range of 100 to 200 MeV, and it has a uniform spatial distribution. The shield design and the associated analyses are presented including different parametric studies. In the analyses, a significant effort was dedicated to the accurate prediction of the radiation dose outside the shield boundary as a function of the shield thickness without geometrical approximations or material homogenization. The MCNPX Monte Carlo code was utilized for the transport calculation of electrons, photons, and neutrons. Weight window variance-reduction techniques were introduced, and the dose equivalent outside the shield can be calculated with reasonably good statistics.