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
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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.
Yoshinori Nakahara, Kenya Suyama, Jun Inagawa, Ryuji Nagaishi, Setsumi Kurosawa, Nobuaki Kohno, Mamoru Onuki, Hiroki Mochizuki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 137 | Number 2 | February 2002 | Pages 111-126
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-2
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To establish a nuclide composition benchmark data set for the verification of burnup codes, destructive analyses of light water reactor spent-fuel samples, which were cut out from several heights of spent-fuel rods, were carried out at the analytical laboratory at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute. The 16 samples from three kinds of pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuel rods and the 18 samples from two boiling water reactor (BWR) fuel rods were examined. Their initial 235U enrichments and burnups were from 2.6 to 4.1% and from 4 to 50 GWd/t, respectively. One PWR fuel rod and one BWR fuel rod contained gadolinia as a burnable poison. The measurements for more than 40 nuclides of uranium, transuranium, and fission product elements were performed by destructive analysis using mass spectrometry, and alpha-ray and gamma-ray spectrometry. Burnup for each sample was determined by the 148Nd method. The analytical methods and the results as well as the related irradiation condition data are compiled as a complete benchmark data set.
