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
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
2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
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 2024
Jan 2024
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2024
Nuclear Technology
May 2024
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Commercial nuclear innovation "new space" age
In early 2006, a start-up company launched a small rocket from a tiny island in the Pacific. It exploded, showering the island with debris. A year later, a second launch attempt sent a rocket to space but failed to make orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. Another year brought a third attempt—and a third failure. The following month, in September 2008, the company used the last of its funds to launch a fourth rocket. It reached orbit, making history as the first privately funded liquid-fueled rocket to do so.
K. Tomlinson, D. G. Schroen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 288-295
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16352
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Preshot characterization of the thickness and form of material samples in targets for dynamic materials properties experiments presents unique challenges. Because of design limitations, the measurement tools currently used introduce increasing error as samples deviate from perfect flatness or thickness uniformity. Contact measurements such as height gages and micrometers, for example, are insensitive to thickness variations occurring over spatial scales smaller than the contact probes. In addition, they measure thickness but not form and often damage samples. Standard confocal microscopes overcome some of these problems but can only measure form on the side of the sample that they see. Also, by design, they consistently overestimate thickness because form errors on the side of the sample against the reference surface always prevent perfect contact with it. We are developing a technique that may prove to be superior to both of these methods at characterizing both thickness and form of samples with both imperfect flatness and nonuniform thickness using only an interferometric optical profiler, an inexpensive fixture, a gage block, and a commercial three-dimensional modeling software. The end result is a computer model of the actual sample.