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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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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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.
G. C. Abell, A. Attalla
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 14 | Number 2 | September 1988 | Pages 643-648
Tritium Properties and Interactions with Material | Proceedings of the Third Topical Meeting on Tritium Technology in Fission, Fusion and Isotopic Applications (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 1-6, 1988) | doi.org/10.13182/FST88-A25207
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) studies of aging phenomena in palladium tritide. 3He NMR relaxation parameters have been measured as a function of temperature for 6-, 13-, and 22-month-old beta phase palladium tritide. The most significant result of this study is the observation of a solid/fluid phase transition near 250 K of 3He that has accumulated in the PdTx substrate via triton decay. Although the existence of solid helium at relatively high temperatures had been predicted for helium in metals, it had not previously been confirmed in any metal/helium system. The observed melting temperatures, together with the known equation of state for 4He, allow a determination of the helium density as a function of age. The atomic density obtained in this way is approximately 2.0 times that of palladium metal, agreeing with densities inferred from dilatometric measurements of other metal tritides and also with predictions based on the concept of dislocation loop punching by highly overpressurized He bubbles. The 3He signal in the 22-month-old sample was sufficiently strong to allow a detailed study of melting as a function of temperature, and provides information on the distribution of densities over the ensemble of bubbles.
