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
Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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.
K. V. Subbaiah, C. Sunil Sunny
Nuclear Technology | Volume 135 | Number 3 | September 2001 | Pages 265-272
Technical Paper | Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT01-A3221
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
KAMINI is the Kalpakkam Mini Reactor, and its main purpose is to cater to experimental needs and for neutron radiography. It is a water-cooled reactor with 233U as the fissile material. Using the Monte Carlo n-particle transport code MCNP, shielding optimization calculations are carried out for the south beam port tube, which is meant for neutron radiography of spent-fuel subassemblies of the fast breeder test reactor. The neutron beam port is a graded cylindrical aluminium channel starting from the center of the reactor core; it pierces through the biological shield and is 2 m long. The diameter of the channel at the core center is 54 mm, at the other end it is 25 cm, and it is 0.5 m below the floor level. The latter end serves as the neutron surface source for these calculations. The calculations have been carried out in cylindrical geometry (r,z) of shield structures. From results of the analysis, a movable shield 50 cm thick (25 cm paraffin and 25 cm lead), 75 cm wide, and 172 cm long extending ~95 cm into the demineralizer room (cooling water purification room) is proposed to replace the existing temporary shield structure. In addition, fixed shields of the same thickness and width of 50 cm on either side of the beam is recommended to reduce the dose levels to a few tens of microsieverts per hour in the accessible areas. Further, the lead-shielded cylindrical tube meant for insertion of irradiated fuel subassemblies for neutron radiography needs to be covered with 20 cm of paraffin up to a height of 1 m from ground level to avoid streaming of neutrons through the air column.