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Conference Spotlight
2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Nano to begin drilling next week in Illinois
It’s been a good month for Nano Nuclear in the state of Illinois. On October 7, the Office of Governor J.B. Pritzker announced that the company would be awarded $6.8 million from the Reimagining Energy and Vehicles in Illinois Act to help fund the development of its new regional research and development facility in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook.
Gerald P. Jackson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 208 | Number 1 | December 2022 | Pages S107-S112
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1997057
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Low-mass antimatter-based propulsion systems are well matched to low-mass unmanned spacecraft sent to explore exoplanets and transmit back scientific observations. In the case of nearby habitable-zone exoplanet Proxima b, flyby missions as short as 20 years are being contemplated. In order to achieve spacecraft velocities greater than 2% of the speed of light, exhaust particle velocities commensurate with kinetic energies of at least 1 MeV/nucleon are required. The design of a nuclear propulsion system capable of such particle energies is presented. The scope of this technical note is restricted to the nuclear physics of antiproton-induced fission, classical physics of collimating charged exhaust particles, and the accelerator physics of a particle trap within which the fission events are generated. Other vital issues such as antimatter production and storage are the subject of papers in other journals more appropriate for these subjects.