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 Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
Meeting Spotlight
2025 ANS Annual Conference
June 15–18, 2025
Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott 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
Jun 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
August 2025
Nuclear Technology
July 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Nuclear fuel cycle reimagined: Powering the next frontiers from nuclear waste
In the fall of 2023, a small Zeno Power team accomplished a major feat: they demonstrated the first strontium-90 heat source in decades—and the first-ever by a commercial company.
Zeno Power worked with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to fabricate and validate this Z1 heat source design at the lab’s Radiochemical Processing Laboratory. The Z1 demonstration heralded renewed interest in developing radioisotope power system (RPS) technology. In early 2025, the heat source was disassembled, and the Sr-90 was returned to the U.S. Department of Energy for continued use.
Workshop
Sunday, September 25, 2022|1:00–5:00PM PDT|Seaport
Attila4MC provides MCNP® 6.2 users with a graphical user interface based environment to set up, run, and visualize MCNP unstructured mesh solutions from complex CAD geometries. Attila4MC also includes the unstructured mesh Attila deterministic solver for weight windows variance reduction using the CADIS and FW-CADIS methods.
In this workshop, new and existing features of Attila4MC will be demonstrated on a realistic shielding example. The new Attila4MC mesh generator will also be introduced, which is capable of building unstructured mesh models from dirty CAD assemblies with interferences and hundreds or thousands of parts. Other new features will also be demonstrated, including the LDAS (linear discontinuous adaptive step) spatial discretization algorithm for CADIS and FW-CADIS, which produces accurate and smooth solutions for efficient weight windows.
The second half of this workshop is hands-on, where attendees will set up, run, and visualize a deep penetration shielding model starting with a CAD model. Both the CADIS and FW-CADIS variance reduction models will be employed. A secondary solution will also be generated using the Attila deterministic solver. Attendees wishing to run Attila4MC should bring a Windows 10 or 11 laptop with at least 6 GB of RAM. Attendees wishing to also run MCNP must have MCNP 6.2.0 installed. Attendees are invited to bring their own CAD models (Parasolid® or ACIS® formats preferable), as the last hour will include an optional open workshop allowing users to work through their own models with help from Silver Fir Software instructors.
The workshop will conclude with a 30-minute demonstration by Kinectrics of ADEPT, a first-of-its-kind application that leverages the latest virtual reality (VR) technologies to generate an interactive 3D scenario for visualizing and modifying dose rate fields and isotopic activities. The dose rate fields used for input can be generated from Attila/Attila4MC calculations, and from actual scans of radioactive sources. Kinectrics has expanded on ADEPT’s capabilities by partnering with Cavendish Nuclear to create the ADEPT-PSIM process, which utilizes the Cavendish PSIM tool to more accurately characterize radioactive sources from multiple rad scans.
All attendees will receive a 1 month license of Attila4MC following the workshop. For any questions regarding the workshop, contact support@silverfirsoftware.com.
To join the conversation, you must be logged in and registered for the meeting.
Register NowLog In