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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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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.
K. C. Lee, R. N. Cherdack
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 4 | Number 2 | September 1983 | Pages 603-608
Fusion System Studies | doi.org/10.13182/FST83-A22928
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A relatively high temperature superheated steam cycle was designed to be compatible with a D-D tokamak blanket to help identify some of the benefits of using the D-D fuel .cycle. Since less tritium leaves the plasma in a D-D reactor than in a D-T reactor and tritium is not produced in the D-D reactor blanket, it may be acceptable for steam generated in the first wall and blanket to be used directly in a turbine generator. Calculations indicated high temperature superheated steam (811K, 12.5MPa) could be generated within the allowable stresses of presently available piping materials. Based on these turbine inlet conditions, a backpressure of 50 mm HgA, 6-feedwater heaters, 1 reheater and a 6-flow cross compound turbine generator, the overall cycle efficiency is estimated to be 40.5%.
