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Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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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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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.
R. J. La Haye
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 1 | January 1996 | Pages 126-133
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30662
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nonaxisymmetric error fields arising from departures of the coil systems from axisymmetry can pose serious problems for the tokamak divertor. The X points of the divertor are particularly sensitive to being shifted by n ≠ 0 error fields; toroidal “bundle diverting” or bunching of heat flux coming from the core of the tokamak can produce hot spots on carefully designed divertor structures. Toroidal variation of the angle of incidence on the divertor by the n ≠ 0 error field can also locally peak the heat flux. Multiple field line tracing of a typical diverted Tokamak Physics Experiment (TPX) configuration with nonconcentric poloidal field (PF) coils is used to predict that if the toroidal variation of the peak divertor heat flux is to be kept to within ±25%, the principal PF coils responsible for the diverting must be aligned to ±2 mm of concentricity with the toroidal field.
