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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
R. J. Dowling, J. F. Clarke, S. E. Berk
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 6 | Number 2 | September 1984 | Pages 327-334
Technical Paper | Selected papers from the Ninth International Vacuum Congress and the Fifth International Conference on Solid Surfaces (Madrid, Spain, September 26-October 1, 1983) | doi.org/10.13182/FST84-A23203
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The United States (U.S.) Government supports a national program that seeks to demonstrate the scientific and engineering feasibility of magnetic fusion. The goal of the U.S. program is to develop a reactor concept to the point where decisions on commercial development can be made. This goal focuses the U.S. program on moving from its present research and development status toward commercial development. The U.S. program is nearing completion of the scientific feasibility phase, which will demonstrate that a magnetically confined plasma can produce, on a laboratory scale, a significant amount of energy in a potentially useful form. The U.S. plan is to pursue, at a pace commensurate with available resources, the product definition phase, which will identify a potentially practical confinement concept, and the product development phase, which will develop the technical base necessary for decisions about the practical use of magnetic fusion. This paper provides an overview of the U.S. magnetic fusion energy program including goals and objectives, strategy, status, international cooperation, and budgets.