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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
Yoshiki Murakami*, Masayoshi Sugihara
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 24 | Number 4 | December 1993 | Pages 375-390
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST93-A30188
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Steady-state and hybrid-mode operation of a tokamak fusion reactor is investigated by power balance calculations, and operation points are optimized with respect to divertor heat load. The dependence of the divertor heat load on a variety of models is also discussed. Several schemes to reduce the heat load are investigated, and the goal of physics research and development is clarified. Hybrid-mode operation appears to be suitable for technology testing, which requires a long burn time and a high neutron wall load. The divertor heat load can be reduced to the ignition-mode level without impurity seeding if the energy confinement is enhanced by 10%. The relation between the divertor heat load and the controllability of the current profile, that is, the fraction of the beam-driven current, is also discussed.
