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Division Spotlight
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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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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.
Rasol Khoda-Bakhsh, Heinrich Hora, George H. Miley
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 24 | Number 1 | August 1993 | Pages 28-36
Technical Paper | ICF Target | doi.org/10.13182/FST93-A30172
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
As the volume ignition of deuterium-helium-3 (D-3He) and deuterium-deuterium (D-D) fuels has been numerically modeled, the nuclear fusion reaction , including the secondary D(d,n) He and D(d,p) reactions, is now investigated, and its energy efficiency and ignition conditions are examined. For the first time, it is shown that although the n/D-3He ratio depends on volume and density, this ratio is small and nearly the same for different pellet volumes and pellet concentrations for conditions where pellet ignition occurs. Also, the inclusion of the D-D reactions increases the fusion gain and significantly changes the ignition conditions.
