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!
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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.
Abd Y. Lafi, Jose N. Reyes, Jr.
Nuclear Technology | Volume 130 | Number 2 | May 2000 | Pages 177-183
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3085
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A comparison is presented between station blackout tests conducted in both the Advanced Plant Experiment (APEX) facility and in the modified Rig of Safety Assessment (ROSA/AP600) Large-Scale Test Facility. The comparison includes the depressurization and liquid-level behavior during secondary-side blowdown, natural circulation, automatic depressurization system operation, and in-containment refueling water storage tank injection. Reasonable agreement between the test results from APEX NRC-2 and ROSA/AP600 AP-BO-01 has been observed with respect to the timing of depressurization and liquid draining rates. This indicates that the reduced height and pressure scaling of APEX preserves the sequence of events relative to the full-height and pressure ROSA/AP600.
