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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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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.
M. J. Gouge, W. A. Houlberg, S. E. Attenberger, S. L. Milora, R. A. Causey, J. L. Anderson, D. Petti, O. Kveton, D. F. Holland
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 4 | November 1995 | Pages 1644-1650
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30431
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Isotopic tailoring of the deuterium and tritium density profiles infusion reactors can lead to reduced tritium inventory in plasma facing components and, therefore, improved safety considerations. The isotopic tailoring concept consists of utilizing a tritium-rich pellet source for core fueling and a deuterium-rich gas source for edge fueling. Because of the improved particle confinement associated with the deeper tritium core fueling component, comparable core densities of deuterium and tritium can be maintained even when the edge deuterium fuel source is much larger than the core tritium fuel source. The fuel composition of the edge and scrape-off plasmas as well as the isotope fractions in plasma facing components reflect the total through-put of all makeup fuel and are therefore deuterium-rich. This innovative fueling concept results in about a factor of two reduction in tritium inventory of the plasma facing components. The higher tritium burn fraction allows a significant reduction in tritium gas flows into and out of the vacuum vessel and, for fusion reactors, implies lower required tritium breeding ratios.