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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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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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.
Robert G. Mills
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 9 | Number 3 | May 1986 | Pages 408-421
Technical Paper | Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST86-A24729
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A reactor is proposed in which the principal role of the magnetic field is to reduce the thermal conductivity. A purely toroidal magnetic field confines a plasma whose pressure is almost constant. The plasma is limited in height by two planar electrodes. The density rises as the temperature falls toward the material boundaries to maintain essentially isobaric conditions. Fueling the reactor is a simple by-product of the drift motion of the ions through the reactor, the confinement time being determined by the residence time of transport rather than by diffusion. As in many reactor schemes, the size is large, but not unreasonable. There are unsolved problems requiring research, but these seem addressable with modest temperature plasmas.