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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.
David Bernat, Richard B. Stephens
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 31 | Number 4 | July 1997 | Pages 473-476
Technical Paper | Eleventh Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A30804
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A long-standing problem in the characterization of multi-layered ICF capsules is the determination of the position of surfaces and interfaces from x-radiographic images. The accepted procedure for analyzing such images is to calculate the radial second derivative of x-ray absorption through a shell to locate the points of inflection in the absorption vs. radius plot which denote the layer interfaces. The computer routine developed in 1994 as an addition to NIH Image to perform this analysis was subject to unnecessary noise caused by calculating the radial finite second derivative (Δ2z/Δr2) from the interpolated radial points. Our most recent algorithm update solves this problem by directly determining the radial infinitesimal second derivative (d2z/dr2) of a cubic interpolation of surrounding pixels. This new procedure allows us to make reliable measurements of wall thickness vs. angle and layer uniformity, an improvement over the original method which only yielded layer thickness values averaged over all 360° of the shell.
