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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
Hirotaka Kawamura, Hideo Hirano
Nuclear Technology | Volume 129 | Number 3 | March 2000 | Pages 398-406
Technical Paper | Reactor Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3070
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To clarify the concentration behavior of sodium hydroxide, which is a representative impurity in the pressurized water reactor (PWR) secondary water coolant of a heat transfer crevice, an in situ high-temperature aqueous conductivity measurement cell was designed with the simulated tube support plate crevice of a PWR steam generator. The concentration factors of sodium hydroxide were calculated from the results of the conductivity measurement, and the effects of heat flux and solution temperature on the concentration factors were also examined. The conductivities in the crevice were measured in deaerated sodium hydroxide aqueous solutions in a range from 260 to 280°C.The main test results show that the conductivity of high-temperature water increased with an increase of concentration and temperature in the deaerated sodium hydroxide solution and that the conductivity in the tube-tube-support-plate crevice was higher than that of bulk water because of concentrated sodium hydroxide in a crevice. Therefore, this method is applicable to evaluation of the impurity concentration behavior in a crevice. The calculated results of the concentration factor reveal that the factor was ~2000 in the range of the heat flux, i.e., the range for the region of a dry and wet condition, and the concentration factors in the sodium hydroxide solutions were lower than those of the field data.
