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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.
V. S. Belikov, Ya. I. Kolesnichenko
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 25 | Number 3 | May 1994 | Pages 258-265
Technical Paper | Alpha-Particle Special / Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30282
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The distribution function of fast alpha particles in a tokamak plasma near the outer circumference of the torus is obtained. Calculations are carried out for an axisymmetric tokamak for which the alpha-particle banana width is small in comparison with the plasma radius but sufficiently large to provide the presence of trapped alpha particles, produced in the plasma core, in the plasma edge region. It is shown that alpha particles with this distribution function can excite an edge-localized instability of plasma on magnetoacoustic waves with a frequency close to the harmonics of the alpha-particle gyrofrequency. This contributes to an explanation of the superthermal ion-cyclotron emission observed experimentally on the Joint European Torus (JET) and the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR).
