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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.
Kenneth L. Wrisley, Don Steiner
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 13 | Number 3 | March 1988 | Pages 453-462
Technical Paper | Alpha-Particle Workshop / Fusion Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25123
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the potentially attractive applications of nuclear fusion is to breed fissile fuel for use in fission reactors. A fusion-fission breeder is examined, based on four unique concepts: operation in a non-power-producing mode, a low technology (low pressure and temperature) aqueous self-cooled blanket for breeding fissile fuel, the spherical torus confinement scheme (low-aspect-ratio tokamak), and the catalyzed deuterium-deuterium (D-D) fuel cycle. The breeding of fissile fuel is accomplished by dissolving a uranium salt, i.e., uranyl nitrate, in heavy water that cools both the first wall and blanket. The use of the catalyzed D-D fuel cycle eliminates the need for tritium breeding. The neutron wall loading for this reactor is only ∼0.5 MW/m2, and the fusion power output is ∼1000 MW(thermal). Analysis of this novel reactor concept indicates a fissile breeding ratio of 1.34 fissile atom/source neutron using a 15-cm beryllium moderator/multiplier region and 7 mol% uranyl nitrate in the heavy water. A typical reactor using this blanket can produce more than 7400 kg of plutonium per operating year. This concept can provide fissile fuel at a cost that is comparable to previous fusion breeder designs but at a capital cost of about one-third that of the previous designs.