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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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.
G. Pantis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 3 | Number 3 | May 1983 | Pages 498-505
Technical Paper | Economic | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A20872
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigated the power capabilities and the economic performance of a semicatalyzed-deuterium hybrid reactor with a fissionable blanket fueling a D-3He field-reversed mirror satellite. The hybrid reactor consists of five cells each producing 15-MW fusion power by a total injection of 29 MW of 160-keV deuterium. With a blanket multiplication of four, it supplies a net electric output power of 61 MW, corresponding to an economic figure-of-merit (FOM) of roughly 1800 dollar/kW(electric), which compares favorably with conventional fission reactors. The D-3He satellite is a single-cell reactor of 1 0-MW net electric power, showing a rather high economic FOM of ∼4300 dollar/kW(electric), giving an average economic FOM of ∼2200 dollar/kW(electric) for the combined system.
