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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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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Nuclear Technology
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.
Robert A. Rice, Gary S. Chulick, Yeong E. Kim, Jin-Hee Yoon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 1 | August 1990 | Pages 147-150
Technical Note | Cold Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29241
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Reaction rates from recent electrochemical fusion experiments have been found to be as many as seventy orders of magnitude larger than those obtained from simple calculations involving an extrapolated low-energy deuterium-deuterium (D-D) cross section and a sharp velocity distribution. However, if an appropriate Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution is used in place of the conventional sharp (mono-energetic) velocity distribution, the calculated reaction rate increases by as much as fifty to sixty orders of magnitude. Furthermore, the center-of-mass energy at which the D-D cross section is evaluated for given D-D energy is much larger than that used in the conventional calculations due to the higher energy components in the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. Finally, the above results are not significantly affected if a reasonable high-energy cutoff Ec is included in the velocity distribution.