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Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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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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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.
Fredrik Wising, Dan Anderson, Mietek Lisak, Michal Benda
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 25 | Number 3 | May 1994 | Pages 290-301
Technical Paper | Alpha-Particle Special / Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST94-A30285
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A simple and explicit burn criterion is presented, indicating whether a given temperature profile in a fusion plasma established by, for example, auxiliary heating, will evolve toward ignition or quench under the competing influence of alpha-particle heating and thermal conduction losses. The predictions are found to compare well with numerical simulations. The result is also used to demonstrate that peaked density and/or temperature profiles are advantageous from the point of view that the total plasma energy to be established by auxiliary heating in order to reach ignition is minimized.
