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Division Spotlight
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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.
Y. Ikeda, A. Kumar, C. Konno, K. Kosako, Y. Oyama, F. Maekawa, H. Maekawa, M. Z. Youssef, M. A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 1 | August 1995 | Pages 156-172
Technical Paper | Fusion Neutronics Integral Experiments — Part I / Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30404
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear heat deposition rates in the structural components of a fusion reactor, have been measured directly with a microcalorimeter incorporated with an intense deuterium-tritium (D-T) neutron source, the Fusion Neutronics Source (FNS) at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), under the framework of the JAERI/U.S. Department of Energy (U.S. DOE) collaborative program on fusion neutronics. Structural materials of aluminum, titanium, iron, nickel, molybdenum, and Type 304 stainless steel, along with a ceramic of Li2CO3, have been studied with a small-size single probe configuration, subjecting them to D-T neutrons. Heat deposition rates at positions up to 200 mm of depth in a Type 304 stainless steel assembly bombarded with D-T neutrons were measured along with these single probe experiments. The measured heating rates were compared with comprehensive calculations in order to verify the adequacy of the currently available database relevant to the nuclear heating. In general, calculations with data of JENDL-3 and ENDL-85 libraries gave good agreement with experiments for all single probe materials, whereas RMCCS, based on ENDF/B-V, suffered from unreasonable overestimation in the heating number. For Li2CO3 with a low heat conduction coefficient, analysis was carried out by using a heat transfer calculation code ADINAT, coupled with the neutron and gamma-ray transport DOT3.5. It was demonstrated that the nuclear/thermal coupled calculation is a powerful tool to analyze the time-dependent temperature change due to the heat transfer in the probe materials. The analysis for the Type 304 stainless steel assembly, based on JENDL-3, demonstrated that the calculation, in general, was in good agreement with the measurement up to 200 mm of depth along the central axis of the assembly. The experimental approach demonstrated in this study clearly showed the feasibility of the calorimeter to measure the nuclear heating for the neutron field where the 14-MeV contribution is relatively small in comparison with the low-energy neutron contribution.
