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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.
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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
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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.
Clifford E. Singer, Long-Poe Ku, Glenn Bateman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 13 | Number 4 | May 1988 | Pages 543-554
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25134
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nominal predicted plasma conditions in a Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT) are illustrated by transport simulations using experimentally calibrated plasma transport models. The range of uncertainty in these predictions is explored by using various models that have given almost equally good fits to experimental data. Using a transport model that best fits the data, thermonuclear ignition occurs in a CIT design with a major radius of 1.32 m, plasma half-width of 0.43 m, elongation of 2.0, and toroidal field and plasma current ramped in 6 s from 1.7 to 10.4 T and 0.7 to 10 MA, respectively. Ignition is facilitated by 20 MW of heating deposited off the magnetic axis near the 3He minority cyclotron resonance layer. Under these conditions, sawtooth oscillations are small and have little impact on ignition. Tritium inventory is minimized by preconditioning most discharges with deuterium. Tritium is injected, in large frozen pellets, only after minority resonance preheating. Variations of the transport model, impurity influx, heating prof He, and pellet ablation rates have a large effect on ignition and on the maximum beta that can be achieved.