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
Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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.
A. Moisseytsev, Y. Tang, S. Majumdar, C. Grandy, K. Natesan
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 2 | August 2011 | Pages 468-479
Technical Paper | Materials for Nuclear Systems | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12318
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To improve the economic characteristics of fast reactors, researchers are developing advanced structural materials for application to reactor components. These advanced materials provide higher strength at elevated temperatures. Coupled thermal-hydraulic and structural analyses have been carried out to investigate the benefits of the advanced structural materials for a specific fast reactor design: the Advanced Burner Reactor (ABR) developed at Argonne National Laboratory. The benefits of the advanced materials, in terms of increased design margins, possible longer lifetime, thinner structures, and higher operating temperatures, were calculated for the major ABR structural components, including the reactor vessel, the core support structure, the intermediate heat exchanger, the intermediate heat transport system piping, and the steam generator. For each structure, the possible reduction in the component thickness was calculated and was converted into estimates of the commodities savings provided by the use of the advanced materials. Overall, a significant material mass saving of [approximately]40% was calculated for the considered fast reactor structures.
