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
Accelerator Applications
The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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.
Michael C. Baker, Riccardo Bonazza
Nuclear Technology | Volume 125 | Number 1 | January 1999 | Pages 40-51
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2931
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An experimental apparatus for investigating the injection of nitrogen gas and water into the base of a steel tank containing molten tin has been developed. A first set of experiments based on only gas injection has been used to develop a diagnostic technique using continuous high-energy X rays and digital imaging to observe the mixing process and to measure local and average void fractions in the test section as a function of time and space. This unique application of real-time, high-energy, X-ray imaging has been used to generate two-dimensional mappings of the chordal-average void fraction with spatial resolution corresponding to a 0.43-mm2 cross-sectional area perpendicular to the X-ray path and time resolutions of <5 ms. Void fraction measurements with superficial gas injection velocities from 0.07 to 0.14 m/s into a 0.08-m-deep pool of 683 K molten tin indicate that the time and spatial average integral void fraction at these gas injection rates is relatively constant, in the range from 0.26 to 0.31. Similar injections into pools of 0.14- and 0.15-m depths have also exhibited relatively constant average integral void fractions in the range from 0.18 to 0.26. These values are in good agreement with past integral experimental measurements in mercury, Wood's metal, and molten steel.
