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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
May 2025
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.
Rajendra Prashad Anand, Tejen Kumar Basu, Damaraju V. S. Ramakrishna
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 31 | Number 3 | May 1997 | Pages 370-377
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A30839
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Uranium-233 breeding studies are carried out in a compact thorium-oxide cylindrical blanket assembly surrounded by a thick polypropylene reflector in a fusion neutron environment. The assembly consists of 11 rings of thorium-oxide rods stacked in a hexagonal geometry with a central through channel for the 14-MeV (d, t) neutron source. A total of 120 thorium-oxide probes are inserted inside the rods in different axial and radial locations in the assembly, which is then subjected to 14-MeV neutron irradiation for 25 h. Protactinium-233 gamma activity produced in the probes because of neutron captures in the thorium is measured using a high-efficiency, high-purity germanium detector. The measured 233U production rates are fitted to obtain axial and radial distributions for different rings. These distributions are used to obtain the total 233U breeding in the whole assembly. The integral measured values are found to be in good agreement with the calculated values obtained employing the MCNP Monte Carlo code using the BMCCS2 cross-section library.
