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
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
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.
Klaus-Detlef Closs, Reiner Papp
Nuclear Technology | Volume 121 | Number 2 | February 1998 | Pages 101-113
Technical Paper | German Direct Disposal Project | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2822
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Studies on direct disposal of spent fuel started in Germany in 1979. From 1985 to 1995, a research and development (R&D) project was conducted, the objective of which was to develop direct disposal to technical maturity. The main results of this project are presented. As a consequence of this R&D effort, the German Atomic Energy Act was amended in 1994, eliminating the priority of reprocessing and recycling over direct disposal.The judgment of direct disposal by politicians and the nuclear community was subject to change during the period from 1980 through 1995. While initially technical feasibility was the dominating issue, the picture changed after the Act had been amended. Evidence of guaranteed Entsorgung, meaning all steps at the back end of the fuel cycle and which is provided by foreign reprocessing contracts, turned out to be an important decision criterion.
