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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
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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.
Karl Erickson, N. J. Mccormick, Gene L. Woodruff
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 1 | Number 4 | October 1981 | Pages 533-541
Technical Paper | Hybrid Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST81-A19946
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The feasibility of spatial and temporal power density flattening in fusion-fission hybrid reactors was investigated by varying the concentration of 239Pu within a set of zones in the fission region and by examining two different fuel management schemes. Blanket designs with no 239Pu typically had a spatial maximum-to-average power density ratio of ∼2.5, but this value was reduced to between 1.26 and 1.67, depending on the design and fuel management scheme selected. Unfortunately, however, significant impact occurs only with relatively high fissile concentrations, with the outer zones approaching equilibrium values. Thus, either an impractically large fissile inventory for startup or long operating histories would be required.
