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
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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.
William S. Charlton, Robert T. Perry, Bryan L. Fearey, Theodore A. Parish
Nuclear Technology | Volume 131 | Number 2 | August 2000 | Pages 210-227
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3112
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Techniques have been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory for accurately calculating certain spent-fuel isotope concentration ratios for pressurized water reactor assemblies using a linked MCNP/ORIGEN2 code named Monteburns 3.01, without resorting to an assembly or full-core calculation. The effects of various fuel parameters such as the number of radial fuel regions per pin, burnup step size, reactor power, reactivity control mechanisms, and axial profiles have been studied. The significance of each factor was determined. A method was also proposed for calculating spent-fuel inventories as a function of burnup for a wide range of reactors and fuel types. It was determined that accurate calculations can be obtained using a three-dimensional, modified pin cell with seven radial fuel regions and two (flat-flux) axial fuel regions calculated with 2000 MWd/tonne U burnup steps for burnups ranging from 0 to 50 000 MWd/tonne U. The calculational technique was benchmarked to measured values from the Calvert Cliffs Unit 1 reactor, and good agreement from the point of view of calibrating a monitoring instrument was found for most cases.
