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Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
John McLeod
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 11 | Number 3 | May 1987 | Pages 654-670
Technical Paper | KrF Laser | doi.org/10.13182/FST87-A25041
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Aurora is the Los Alamos short-pulse, high-power, krypton fluoride laser system. It is now conceived of as an end-to-end technology demonstration prototype for large-scale ultraviolet laser systems of interest for short wavelength, inertial confinement fusion (ICF) investigations. The system is designed to employ optical angular multiplexing and serial amplification by electron-beam-driven KrF laser amplifiers to deliver to ICF targets a stack of pulses with a duration of 5 ns containing several kilojoules at a wavelength of 248 nm. The optical system has been designed in two phases. The first phase carries only through the amplifier train and does not include a target chamber or any demultiplexing. During first-phase design, the system was conceived of as only an amplifier demonstration and not as an end-to-end system demonstration. The design concept for second-phase optics that provides demultiplexing and carries the laser light to target is presented. Discussion of the effects of first-stage design is obligatory. At the time of writing, detailed design has begun, but no hardware exists, except for the newly completed building. Some aspects of this discussion have benefited from the first fruits of detailed design, but others are still conceptual.