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
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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.
P. Barbucci, L. Bella
Nuclear Technology | Volume 112 | Number 1 | October 1995 | Pages 1-8
Technical Paper | Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A15847
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The results of a simulation activity on a General Electric (GE) simplified boiling water reactor (SB WR) carried out at ENEL (the Italian Electricity Board) are discussed. The SBWR is a medium-size [600 MW(electric)] new generation reactor developed by GE, whose safety is ensured by means of passive systems (water gravity injection, pressure suppression, and passive heat removal). The RELAP5/MOD2 code is a well-known tool developed at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratories and made available by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; it has been widely used and qualified all over the world. To investigate the thermal-hydraulic performance of such an innovative reactor during accident scenarios, a SBWR RELAP5/MOD2 model was developed and a selected number of transients were analyzed. The typical phenomena related to the SBWR accident behavior was investigated. A good agreement was found between the RELAP5/MOD2 code and the licensing code (TRAC-G) results. In all cases, the performance of the SBWR safety systems was also evaluated.
