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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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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Fusion Science and Technology
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.
S. L. Painter, J. F. Lyon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 16 | Number 2 | September 1989 | Pages 157-171
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST89-A29145
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Loss of alpha particles from compact torsatron reactors with M = 6, 9, and 12, where M is the number of field periods, is studied. The direct loss is a relatively weak function of radius and energy and varies from ≃33% for M = 6 to ≃18% for M = 12. Loss of alpha particles through scattering into the loss region is calculated using the Fokker-Planck equation and is found to contribute an additional alpha-particle energy loss of ≃15%. The consequences of these relatively large losses for torsatron reactor design are discussed. A figure of merit that characterizes the orbit confinement for a magnetic configuration is deduced and used to show how the direct alpha-particle losses might be reduced.
