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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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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.
Frederick A. Haas, Anantanarayanan Thyagaraja
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 31 | Number 2 | March 1997 | Pages 159-168
Technical Paper | Plasma Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A30818
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An important issue infusion power plant design involves the effect of sawteeth on power transients and ash removal. A model was previously presented for sawtooth oscillations in tokamaks based on a thermal instability mechanism mediated by turbulence in the q < 1 core. This model has been validated against current machines such as the Joint European Torus (JET) and the Tokamak Experiment for Technol.ogy-Oriented Research (TEXTOR). Here, it is adapted to include effects of alpha particle heating in a reacting plasma. The goal is to study the interaction between fusion reactions and the sawtooth turbulence dynamics. The alpha particle heating rate function is sensitive to temperature variations and could possibly result in a thermal instability mechanism for amplifying sawtooth temperature fluctuations under typical conditions. Taking International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)-like conditions as an example, calculations are performed to illustrate this generic behavior. These conditions suggest that while the sawteeth are effective in helium ash removal from the q < 1 region, they can produce significant spikes in the alpha power.
