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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.
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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.
YA. Kolesnichenko, D. Anderson, M. Lisak
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 6 | Number 3 | November 1984 | Pages 543-547
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST84-A23135
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The regimes of thermonuclear burning in self-sustained and driven tokamak reactors using deuterium-tritium plasma with nuclei polarized along the magnetic field are investigated. A comparison is made between the burning regimes in reactors with polarized and unpolarized plasma. In particular, it is shown that the temperature regions that allow stable steady-state thermonuclear reactions are similar for both types of reactors. However, as compared to the conventional case, the driven reactor with polarized nuclei requires higher power levels of neutral injection or radio-frequency heating to achieve the same stable temperature regime. The power multiplication factor, when using polarized nuclei, is unchanged or may be higher due to deterioration of alpha-particle confinement.