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Fuel Cycle & Waste Management
Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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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.
Ronald I. Ewing, Michael A. Butler, James E. Schirber, D. S. Ginley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 16 | Number 3 | November 1989 | Pages 404-407
Special Section Content | Cold Fusion Technical Notes | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A29135
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A search for neutrons from deuterium “cold fusion” systems (both electrochemical and high-pressure gas cells) was conducted in an underground laboratory using three highly sensitive neutron detectors composed of 3He gas proportional counter tubes embedded in polyethylene moderators. Any neutron emission from a test cell would be simultaneously observed in all three detectors in a known proportion. The counting system can detect random, continuous emission at a rate of <100 n/h, and short bursts of as few as 35 neutrons. None of the cold fusion systems tested emitted neutrons at these levels. Occasional anomalous groups of counts were observed in individual detectors that closely mimicked both continuous and burst emission. These anomalies were identified as spurious detector artifacts rather than true detection, because counts were not observed in the appropriate proportion in all three detectors. The use of multiple detectors simultaneously observing the test system in a very low background environment can effectively identify spurious artifacts that might otherwise be interpreted as evidence of neutron emission and may be essential to the demonstration of low-level neutron production from cold fusion systems.