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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.
Jungchung Jung
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 3 | November 1983 | Pages 566-585
Special Section Contents | Radioactivation of Fusion Structures | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22808
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Activation analysis has been conducted for several primary fusion blanket materials based on a model of a commercial tokamak fusion reactor design, STARFIRE. The blanket materials studied include two solid tritium breeders, viz., Li20 and α-LiAl02, and four candidate structural materials, viz., PCA stainless steel, V15Cr5Ti, Ti6Al4V, and Al-6063 alloys. The importance of breeder material activation is identified in terms of its impurity contents such as potassium, iron, nickel, molybdenum, and zirconium trace elements. The breeder activation is also discussed with regard to its potential for recycling and its impact on the lithium resource requirements. The structural material activation is analyzed based on two measures, volumetric radioactivity concentration and contact biological dose due to decay gamma emission. Using the radioactivity concentration measure, it is revealed that a substantial advantage exists from a viewpoint of radwaste management, which is inherent in fusion reactor designs based on potential low-activation alloys such as V15Cr5Ti, Ti6Al4V, and Al-6063. On the other hand, from the dose standpoint, the V15Cr5Ti alloy is found to be the only alloy for which one could realize a significant dose reduction (below 2.5 mrem/h) within ∼100 yr after shutdown, possibly by some extrapolation on alloy purification techniques.