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Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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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.
Chun-Ching Chien, Theresa Chen Huang
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 22 | Number 3 | November 1992 | Pages 391-394
Technical Note on Cold Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST92-A30098
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tritium activity values are obtained from the electrolysis of heavy water on palladium and are higher than background values by over three orders of magnitude in at least 10 of 100 experiments. These values are far in excess of those expected from the enrichment of tritium during long-term electrolysis. The pretreatment of palladium, including acid etching and anodic charging and initial mild cathodic charging, seems to play the most important role in the success of the current experiments. Raising the temperature might enhance the rate of reaction, while small voltage increases will trigger the reaction. Too large an applied voltage change will quench the reaction. It is observed that heavy water additions or turbulence of the electrolyte might be a possible cause of the temporary quenching of the reaction.