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
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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.
Matjaz Ravnik, Tomaz Zagar, Andreja Persic
Nuclear Technology | Volume 128 | Number 1 | October 1999 | Pages 35-45
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3012
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculations of fuel element burnup for realistic mixed core conditions in a 250-kW TRIGA Mark II reactor are presented. Two types of fuel elements are considered: 70% enriched FLIP and 20% enriched standard fuel elements. Two calculation models are compared. The first is based on a one-dimensional two-group diffusion approximation (the TRIGAP computer code), and the second is based on a two-dimensional four-group diffusion equation (the TRIGLAV computer code). In both cases the unit-cell group constants are generated with the WIMS code. Results of the calculations are intercompared to evaluate the influence of the two-dimensional effects on fuel element burnup. The following two-dimensional effects are considered: mixed rings, in-core water gaps, vicinity of control rods, and asymmetric core loading patterns. Relative differences in fuel element burnup of 10% on average and up to 80% in extreme cases are observed because of the two-dimensional effects. The accuracy of the calculation is estimated also by comparing the calculated results to the measurements using the reactivity method.
