ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
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.
Philip L. Matheson, Richard A. Nebel, Grant W. Mason
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 18 | Number 2 | September 1990 | Pages 257-272
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29298
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Magnetic divertors have been proven successful in minimizing plasma/wall interactions and in leading to high-confinement regimes in tokamaks. This suggests that similar benefits may occur in a reversed-field pinch (RFP) fitted with a divertor. Previous experiments using divertors in an RFP have used a poloidal field divertor configuration such as those used in tokamaks. This study investigates another approach, a toroidal field divertor (TFD). A simple model of a poloidally symmetric TFD is presented and used in a three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic code to study the response of the plasma to the large poloidal m = 0 perturbations caused by the divertor coils. It is found that the topology of the RFP-TFD system is much more complex than had been expected. The three-dimensional DEBS code shows that the divertor will not hinder the formation of a reversed toroidal field in the plasma, although the dynamics of its formation is altered when toroidal effects are considered. The plasma develops flows and currents in the throat of the divertor in response to the vacuumlike divertor fields. These flows and currents tend to restore the force-free character of the plasma.