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Division Spotlight
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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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.
Lawrence Ruby, Michael S. Lewis
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 16 | Number 4 | December 1989 | Pages 491-497
Technical Paper | Special Section: Cold Fusion Technical Notes / Plasma Heating System | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A29111
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An alternative mixed beam neutral beam injector (MNBI) for fusion reactors is proposed that eliminates the conventional isotope separation system (ISS) in the fuel cycle. The principal advantage of the alternative system is a capital and operating cost savings in the fuel cycle, as the ISS employs cryogenic distillation at liquid-hydrogen temperatures to effect a separation of hydrogen isotopes and to eliminate a buildup of normal hydrogen in the recycled fuel. Possible additional advantages of the alternative method involve an improvement in overall safety and a reduction of the amount of tritium in the fuel cycle. The alternative heating system uses an electromagnetic separation in the MNBI to limit the buildup of normal hydrogen. Calculations indicate that an MNBI can be reasonably optimized in the case of an upgraded injection system for the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor.
