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
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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Apr 2025
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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.
David L. Aumiller, Edward T. Tomlinson, William G. Clarke
Nuclear Technology | Volume 137 | Number 3 | March 2002 | Pages 213-227
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT137-213
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The RELAP5-3D (version bt) computer program was used to assess a General Electric level swell experiment. The primary goal of the new assessment models was to faithfully represent the experimental facility and instrumentation. In developing the new models, a nonphysical representation of the vessel heads in a previous assessment was found. This distortion resulted in predictions that closely matched the experimental data, but were in error. The new assessment also highlighted an instability in the calculation of interfacial drag. To explore this issue, analyses were performed using three different interfacial drag correlations appropriate for large diameter pipes and/or vessels. The results of this study show that the default RELAP5-3D interfacial drag package compares most favorably with the experimental data. Additionally, a numerical instability was uncovered with the analysis performed using the Gardner correlation and was traced to the calculation of bubble diameter in the bubbly flow regime.