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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 ANS Annual Conference
May 31–June 3, 2026
Denver, CO|Sheraton Denver
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
Dec 2025
Jul 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
January 2026
Nuclear Technology
December 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
November 2025
Latest News
AI at work: Southern Nuclear’s adoption of Copilot agents drives fleet forward
Southern Nuclear is leading the charge in artificial intelligence integration, with employee-developed applications driving efficiencies in maintenance, operations, safety, and performance.
The tools span all roles within the company, with thousands of documented uses throughout the fleet, including improved maintenance efficiency, risk awareness in maintenance activities, and better-informed decision-making. The data-intensive process of preparing for and executing maintenance operations is streamlined by leveraging AI to put the right information at the fingertips for maintenance leaders, planners, schedulers, engineers, and technicians.
R. R. Paguio, A. Nikroo, K. M. Saito, J. F. Hund, E. R. Castillo, N. M. Ravelo, K. Quan
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 450-455
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-A7425
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Resorcinol formaldehyde (RF) foam shells are needed for direct-drive inertial confinement laser fusion experiments at the University of Rochester OMEGA laser facility. As previously reported, the addition of long-chained polymers to the fabrication process has improved shell wall uniformity, but this change has led to a lower yield (from ~40 to ~15%) of shells that are gas retentive after the application of glow discharge polymer (GDP) using the standard deposition technique. We have improved this yield by modifying the coating conditions of the GDP overcoating process by modifying the background coating pressure from the constant 75 mTorr to using a two-step coating process of a high-pressure coating at 250 mTorr followed by low-pressure coating of 75 mTorr. This modification has improved the yield of the gas retention on the styrene-butadiene-styrene RF shells from ~15 to ~60%. We have found that the surface roughness of these shells is also improved from ~45 nm root-mean-square (rms) to ~20 nm rms. This technique, however, leads to a slight shrinkage of shells, which will be described.