ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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.
P. J. Reardon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 6 | Number 2 | September 1984 | Pages 335-350
Technical Paper | Selected papers from the Ninth International Vacuum Congress and the Fifth International Conference on Solid Surfaces (Madrid, Spain, September 26-October 1, 1983) | doi.org/10.13182/FST84-A23204
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
TFTR is one of four large 2nd generation tokamak devices, the others being T15, JT60 and JET. TFTR was completed ten months ago, the others are in various stages of construction and initial operation. TFTR, as well as its contemporaries, has important contributions to make towards our understanding of plasma conditions in the thermonuclear reactor regimeò One of the main objectives of TFTR is to produce fusion power densities approaching those in a fusion reactor, 1 W cm−3, at Q ∼ 1–2. This will be done in two ways, first by utilizing the “two component torus” concept whereby high energy deuterium neutral beams at 120 keV collide with a tritium target plasma, thereby making substantial use of the direct driven fusion system and, later, by bulk plasma heating of D-T plasma with neutral beams, ohmic heating, RF, and alpha particles created by longer pulse operations with a D-T reacting plasma. TFTR will be the first tokamak device to use deuterium and tritium fuel. TFTR was designed with remote handling considerations. Table I lists the D-T pulses for Q ≅ 2. The physics objectives of TFTR dictated a relatively compact tokamak with a large diameter plasma. This basic design concept resulted in a machine constructed of massive, high strength, non-magnetic components which require installation to extremely tight tolerances. In this paper the assembly process for TFTR is reviewed from start of assembly in January 1982 to the scheduled completion in December 1982. The techniques, tooling and procedures necessary to complete the tokamak on this aggressive schedule are described. Work-arounds and interim assemblies, used to maintain forward momentum on main assembly, will be discussed. QA, industrial engineering approaches, as-built and other fabrication-related problems, their solutions, and their effect on the design, are summarized. Preliminary start-up performance data for the initial ohmic heating phase will also be discussed. Since TFTR is a major component of the U.S. fusion program and is designed to handle D-T, implications of its experimental program performance will be summarized. Some comments on the remote handling program will also be presented. All of the work reported on was supported by the Office of Fusion Energy of the U.S. Department of Energy.
