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Division Spotlight
Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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.
Mohamed E. Sawan, Lai La A. El-Guebaly, Gregory A. Moses, William F. Vogelsang.
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 1 | July 1983 | Pages 79-92
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22777
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A detailed three-dimensional Monte Carlo nuclear analysis is presented for the heavy-ion-beam-driven reactor HIBALL. Neutron target interactions leading to neutron multiplication, spectrum softening, and gamma production are included in the model A 0.66-m-thick blanket cooled by Pb83Li17 reduces the radiation damage in the HT-9 ferritic steel first wall to 2.7 dpa/full power year, allowing it to last the whole life of the plant. The overall tritium breeding ratio and the overall energy multiplication are 1.25 and 1.27, respectively. The four reactor cavities in the HIBALL power plant yield a total thermal power of 10 200 MW(thermal).
