ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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 Technology
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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.
Igor Salamun, Andrej Stritar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 124 | Number 2 | November 1998 | Pages 118-137
Technical Paper | Reactor Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT98-A2913
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Diagnostic methodologies for nuclear power plants (NPPs) are usually based on mathematical models and generation of residuals. To avoid complicated, time-consuming, and costly diagnostic simulations of the physical phenomena in NPPs, an algorithm that determines a significant pattern for major transients is investigated. Coefficients of the transfer function between the observed parameters are used as the pattern features. The algorithm uses a recurring least-squares method known from the literature to determine the transfer functions. The case study includes 30 different scenarios in the primary and secondary systems. Each scenario produces its own significant recognized pattern. The RELAP5/MOD3.2 code is used to simulate the input data for the Krsko pressurized water reactor NPP. The algorithm recognizes the prepared scenarios, and it classifies them into groups.