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
Decommissioning & Environmental Sciences
The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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.
Evelyn M. Fearon, Stephan A. Letts, Leslie M. Allison, Robert C. Cook
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 31 | Number 4 | July 1997 | Pages 406-410
Technical Paper | Eleventh Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A30793
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this paper we describe our efforts to produce ICF target capsules with either controlled inner surface roughness or thin metallic diagnostic layers by adapting the decomposable mandrel technique previously developed at LLNL. To modify the capsule's inner surface we laser ablated a pattern on a poly(α-methylstyrene) (PAMS) shell, overcoated it with plasma polymer and then thermally decomposed the inner mandrel to leave the plasma polymer shell with the imprint of the laser ablated mandrel pattern. In this fashion we have been able to produce shells with controlled inner surface bumps. However, these bumps are correlated with outer surface pits. To place a thin metallic diagnostic layer on the inner capsule surface we applied a 50 Å titanium sputter coating to a smooth PAMS shell, overcoated with plasma polymer, and then thermally decomposed the mandrel to leave a plasma polymer shell with the titanium layer on the inner surface. Surface analysis showed that this process resulted in shells with a relatively long wavelength roughness, possibly due to the action of the metallic layer as a permeation barrier.
