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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.
E. Bickford Hooper, James H. Hammer, Cris W. Barnes, Juan C. Fernández, Fred J. Wysocki
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 2 | March 1996 | Pages 191-205
Technical Paper | Experimental Device | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30706
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of spheromak experiments are reexamined in light of the hypothesis that the core energy confinement is considerably better than the global confinement and that it extrapolates favorably with magnetic Reynolds number S. The data in decaying spheromaks are found to be consistent with the hypothesis and with magnetic fluctuations scaling as S−1/2 and determining the electron thermal conductivity. No conclusion is drawn from the data for sustained spheromaks, indicating the importance of a new experiment to determine core energy confinement while helicity is injected. The characteristics of such an experiment are discussed, including the importance of using modern vacuum and wall-conditioning techniques and of minimizing magnetic field errors.
