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
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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.
Kenneth W. Burn
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 138-145
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12282
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Direct Statistical Approach (DSA) was developed in the 1980s and 1990s to optimize Monte Carlo deep penetration (fixed-source) radiation transport calculations. It is based on a detailed mathematical approach to the splitting and Russian roulette problem, independent of, or dependent on, the weight of the particle track. As it relies on splitting and Russian roulette, it is of quite general application and has been employed on a wide variety of problems: reactor shielding, accelerator shielding, accelerator-driven systems, dosimetry, and nuclear medicine. The development of the DSA culminated in the inclusion of a multiresponse capability. Over the last 10 years this capability has completely supplanted the single-response version of the DSA. It is considered that the multiresponse capability represents a significant advance. Examples of its use are illustrated. The DSA is currently undergoing a substantial update. The state of the art of the new code is given.
