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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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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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.
R. G. Alsmiller, Jr., R. T. Santoro, J. F. Manneschmidt, J. M. Barnes
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 7 | Number 2 | March 1985 | Pages 197-200
Technical Note | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST85-A24534
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The ion temperature of a deuterium plasma with a Maxwellian distribution can be determined by measuring the transmission of the deuterium-deuterium (D-D) neutrons, i.e., neutrons produced by the reaction D + D → n + 3He, through liquid oxygen. In practice the measurement requires both collimation and shielding to ensure that the attenuation of only those neutrons emitted directly from the plasma is measured. Calculated results are presented of the collimation and shielding required to reduce the background so that the ion temperature can be measured. The geometric configuration used in the calculations is that of the Impurity Studies Experiment (ISX) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but the results will provide insight into the application of the measurement method at other plasma facilities. Results are presented for D-D plasma temperatures of 2, 6, and 10 keV and for two sizes of NE-213 detectors. It is concluded that the counting rates are too low to make the measurement feasible at ISX.
