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
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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!
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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.
P.A. Davis, W.J.G. Workman, H. Noguchi, H. Amano, B.D. Amiro, Y. Ichimasa, M. Ichimasa, F.S. Spencer
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 28 | Number 3 | October 1995 | Pages 840-845
Tritium Safety | Proceedings of the Fifth Topical Meeting on Tritium Technology in Fission, Fusion, and Isotopic Applications Belgirate, Italy May 28-June 3, 1995 | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30509
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Trace amounts of tritiated hydrogen (HT) were released continuously to the atmosphere at Chalk River Laboratories over the 12-day period 1994 July 27 to August 8. Scientists from eight institutions in four countries took extensive air, soil and vegetation samples to study the dynamics of tritiated water (HTO) and organically-bound tritium (OBT) formation, and the environmental concentrations of these compounds at steady-state. The short-term HT air concentrations varied strongly in time and space over the test area, but the variation decreased rapidly as the averaging time increased. HTO concentrations in soil, vegetation and air built up gradually over time but they fluctuated substantially with ambient meteorological conditions, particularly rainfall. OBT concentrations in plants increased throughout the period. HTO concentrations were at or near steady-state at the end of the release, but OBT levels were continuing to rise.
