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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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.
Masayuki Naganuma, Takashi Ogawa, Shigeo Ohki, Tomoyasu Mizuno, Shoji Kotake
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 170-180
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9455
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the Fast Reactor Cycle Technology Development (FaCT) project, a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) with mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel and an SFR with metal fuel were selected as the primary and the secondary candidates, respectively, for the Japan Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (JSFR). The present study focuses on the effects of transuranium (TRU) composition in the design for the JSFR core with MOX fuel. In the transitional stage from light water reactor (LWR) to fast breeder reactor (FBR), there is the possibility for FBR fuel to have high minor actinide (MA) content due to the recycling of LWR spent fuel. High MA content affects core and fuel designs as follows: the neutronic reactivity characteristic changes; the linear power limit is reduced because of decreases of the melting point and thermal conductivity in the fuel; the gas plenum length is extended because of an increase in He gas generation. Thus, to evaluate the effects quantitatively, design studies for cores with two TRU compositions were conducted: an FBR multirecycle composition with [approximately]1 wt% (in heavy metal) of MA content and an LWR recycle composition for which 3 wt% of MA content was assumed as a tentative target. The results show that the change from the FBR multirecycle composition to the LWR recycle composition leads to a sodium void reactivity increase of 10%, a linear power limit decrease of 1 to 2%, and a gas plenum length increase of 5%. As a result, the effects of TRU composition on the core and fuel designs were revealed to be benign.