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
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
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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.
Brian R. Moore, Paul J. Turinsky, Atul A. Karve
Nuclear Technology | Volume 126 | Number 2 | May 1999 | Pages 153-169
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2964
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The computational capability to determine optimal core loading patterns (LPs) for boiling water reactors (BWRs) given a reference control rod program has been developed. The design and fidelity of the reference BWR core simulator are presented. The placement of feed and reload fuel is solved by an adaptive optimization by simulated annealing (OSA) objective algorithm. Objective functions available for BWR fuel management are maximization of end-of-cycle core reactivity, minimization of peak linear power density, maximization of critical power ratio, maximization of region average discharge burnup, and minimization of total reload cost. Constraints include thermal and fuel exposure related limits and cycle energy production, when appropriate. The results presented demonstrate the utility of OSA to improve LPs in this highly nonlinear and constrained search space.
