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
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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.
J. M. Robson, J. Kroon
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 1 | Number 1 | January 1981 | Pages 160-164
Technical Note | Fusion | doi.org/10.13182/FST81-A19923
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Measurements have been made of the thermal neutron fluxes at various distances from a point source of 14-MeV neutrons embedded in three large shields. The first shield consisted of a 24-m3 assembly of solid concrete building blocks of density 2.2 g/cm3 and gave an attenuation length of 14.1 ± 0.7 cm at a distance of 150 cm from the source. The second shield was a layered assembly of wood and concrete blocks with a mean density of 1.92 g/cm3 and gave an attenuation length of 15.7 ± 0.7 cm at the same distance. The third assembly consisted of a cube of side 61 cm of steel surrounded by concrete blocks; at a distance of 120 cm from the source it gave an attenuation length of 9.3 ± 0.4 cm.