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
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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.
N. A. Tahir, D. H. H. Hoffmann
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 1 | January 1996 | Pages 171-177
Technical Paper | ICF Target | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30664
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One-dimensional numerical simulations are presented of the compression and thermonuclear burn of a radiation-driven, reactor-size inertial fusion target that uses a substantially reduced tritium level. A parameter study of thermonuclear energy output is carried out in which the tritium content of the target is systematically reduced. The energy output is found not to be sensitive to a reduction in the tritium content of the target by up to 50%, which means that the tritium inventory in the reactor system could be substantially reduced. Moreover, the tritium fractional burn in low tritium targets is found to be much higher compared with equimolar deuterium-tritium targets. Therefore, the process of evacuation of the target debris from the reactor chamber after each shot will be much cleaner in the former case compared with the latter. These results can have very important implications for the safety and environmental acceptability of future inertial fusion reactor systems.