ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
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.
Robert N. Morris, R. H. Fowler, James A. Rome, T. J. Schlagel
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 12 | Number 2 | September 1987 | Pages 281-292
Plasma Heating Systems | doi.org/10.13182/FST87-A11963786
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The application of the existing Impurity Study Experiment (ISX-B) neutral beam injectors for the Advanced Toroidal Facility is studied. New techniques are required to handle the complicated stellarator geometry of both the vacuum vessel and the plasma. The power delivered to the plasma is found to be a strong function of the beam divergence but only a weak function of the beam focal length. Monte Carlo methods were used to follow the injected particles from the injector until they thermalized in the plasma. An aperture in the beam line is required to prevent excessive heating of the vacuum vessel by the injected beam. Shine-through can be a serious problem if very low density start-ups are necessary. Reasonable assumptions on beam divergence yield an estimate of over 1 MW of power absorbed by the plasma. Preliminary calculations indicate that there will be no excessive fast ion losses.
