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Division Spotlight
Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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.
A. Serikov, U. Fischer, L. Mercatali, P. Baeten, G. Vittiglio
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 877-887
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/NT09-A9322
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The VENUS-F facility of the GUINEVERE project must satisfy the nuclear safety criteria required by the licensing regulations of the Belgian authority. For this reason, radiation shielding analyses were performed at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK) in the course of nuclear safety assessments in support of the GUINEVERE project. The Monte Carlo (MC) MCNP5 model was developed in accordance with the current design of the VENUS-F fast lead reactor. The reactor was assumed to operate on 500-W fission power, which is called zero power, with accelerator-driven system (ADS)-related experimental aims. The MC variance reduction techniques, such as particle splitting, Russian roulette, weight windows, and point detectors, were applied. To speed up the MCNP calculations, the advantages of message-passing interface parallel computations on FZK's CampusGrid Linux Cluster were employed. The MCNP track-length estimations, point detectors, and the mesh tally superimposed over the GUINVERE geometry were used in dose rate calculations. The neutron and photon maps of dose equivalent rate were produced in places of possible personnel access inside the reactor control room and on the accelerator room's floor. To obtain the dose equivalent, the neutron and photon fluences were converted by means of ICRP-77 and ANSI/ANS-6.1.1-1977 conversion factors, respectively. The contributions of the D-D and D-T fusion neutron sources to the dose rate fields were estimated. Activation analyses of the lead core and building materials were performed by the FISPACT-2005 inventory code with the EAF-2005 library to manage the radioactive materials after the series of ADS experiments in the GUINEVERE project. The activity density and shutdown contact dose rate have been calculated. The effect of the impurities in lead on its radioactivity after the VENUS-F campaign was examined.