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
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2026
Jan 2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2026
Nuclear Technology
February 2026
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
OSTP memo guides space nuclear plan
A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum released on Tuesday guides NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense on their roles in deploying near-term space nuclear power.
This follows a series of NASA announcements last month—driven by the executive order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” issued by Trump in December—including an ambitious timeline for establishing a moon base, which would rely on fission surface power (FSP) to survive the long lunar night at the moon’s south pole, and plans for a nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) rocket to be launched in 2028.
Sungmoon Joo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 8 | August 2025 | Pages 1325-1336
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2340171
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This study introduces a novel framework for the robotic decommissioning of nuclear facilities, that focuses on object classification and six degrees of freedom pose estimation from partial-view three-dimensional (3-D) scan data. Addressing the challenge of precise robotic manipulation in environments where acquiring full-scan data is impractical, this framework leverages a deep neural network for initial pose estimation, subsequently refined by a modified iterative closest point algorithm. Our method demonstrates high accuracy in identifying scanned objects and estimating their poses from partial-view scans, validated through experiments with 3-D printed mock-ups. This advancement highlights the potential for significantly enhancing robotic automation in nuclear decommissioning and related fields.