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Division Spotlight
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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
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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.
Kenichi Kurihara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 22 | Number 3 | November 1992 | Pages 334-349
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST22-334-349
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method to identify the shape of tokamak plasmas with a Legendre-Fourier expansion of the vacuum poloidal flux function in toroidal coordinates is improved for the JT-60 Upgrade plasmas. These are pulse plasma discharges that have different sizes, positions, shapes, and internal quantities. The method is based on an analytical solution of the Grad-Shafranov equation in a vacuum region using toroidal coordinates. Although many identification methods previously proposed allow very small perturbations of certain parameters of the nominal plasma, the method presented here can relax the identification restriction on plasmas. Hence, it is applicable to accurate feedback control and real-time visualization of various plasma configurations.
