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Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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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
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.
Reed J. Jensen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 11 | Number 3 | May 1987 | Pages 481-485
Overview | doi.org/10.13182/FST87-A25029
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An overview of KrF laser issues for fusion in the laboratory environment is presented. In this fusion method, lasers are used to compress the deuteriumtritium fuel in the pellet to several thousand times its initial density. Krypton-fluoride lasers offer favorable wavelength, bandwidth, pulse-shaping, efficiency, and high-repetition rate properties for achieving fusion. Large-scale demonstration plants for fusion, however, rely on the improvement or resolution of significant issues: front-end capabilities, amplifiers and amplifier scaling, optical engineering for the ultraviolet, alignment systems, kinetics, beam quality, target coupling, cost, and overall system factors. We feel that KrF lasers may be able to meet the required inertial confinement fusion driver characteristics, driver-target coupling particularities, and capsule physics issues necessary to achieve the final conditions in the implosion that will produce net energy release from the fusion reaction.