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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
Gerald L. Kulcinski, John F. Santarius
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 365-372
Alternate Concepts/Applications | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18104
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Electrical energy is not the only commercial product that can be produced by the fusion of light elements. The reaction products from many fusion fuels can be used to provide products that can be of a near-term benefit to society well before practical fusion power plants are a reality. The use of fusion products (neutrons and protons) in Homeland Security applications to detect clandestine materials or the production of short half life Positron Emission Tomography isotopes for medical diagnostics of abnormalities (e.g. cancers) in the human body are but a few of the near term examples of the near term use of fusion energy. This paper shows how one of the many ways to promote fusion, namely the use of the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement concept, is uniquely suited to this task worldwide.