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.
K. Kim, J. Honig
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 6 | Number 2 | September 1984 | Pages 372-377
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-A23208
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Design, construction, testing, and performance evaluation of a small-bore plasma-arc-driven electromagnetic railgun system are described. The railgun system, which is intended for injecting high-velocity hydrogen pellets into the magnetic fusion devices for the purpose of refueling, has two acceleration stages. One consists of a gas gun preaccelerator and the other a railgun booster accelerator. The plasma-arc armature is formed behind the pellet by electrically discharging the propellant gas following the pellet into the railgun from the gas gun.
