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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
Magdi M. H. Ragheb, Behzad Salimi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 2 | Number 1 | January 1982 | Pages 55-72
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST82-A20734
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritiumless blanket designs, associated with a catalyzed deuterium-deuterium (D-D) fusion cycle and using a single high temperature solid pebble or falling bed zone, for process heat production, are proposed. Neutronics and photonics calculations, using the Monte Carlo method, show that an ∼90% heat deposition fraction is possible in the high temperature zone, compared to a 30 to 40% fraction if a deuterium-tritium (D-T) fusion cycle is used with separate breeding and heat deposition zones. Such a design is intended primarily for synthetic fuels manufacture through hydrogen production using high temperature water electrolysis. A system analysis involving plant energy balances and accounting for the different fusion energy partitions into neutrons and charged particles showed that plasma amplification factors in the range of 2 are needed. In terms of maximization of process heat and electricity production, and the maximization of the ratio of high temperature process heat to electricity, the catalyzed D-D system outperforms the D-T one by ∼20%. The concept is thought competitive to the lithium boiler concept for such applications, with the added potential advantages of lower tritium inventories in the plasma, reduced lithium pumping (in the case of magnetic confinement) and safety problems, less radiation damage at the first wall, and minimized risks of radioactive product contamination by tritium.