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
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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.
Yoshio Shimakawa, Shigeo Kasai, Mamoru Konomura, Mikio Toda
Nuclear Technology | Volume 140 | Number 1 | October 2002 | Pages 1-17
Technical Paper | Fission Reactors | doi.org/10.13182/NT02-A3319
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An innovative concept of a sodium-cooled reactor (the Advanced Loop-Type Fast Reactor) to pursue high economic competitiveness has been developed.Measures to reduce cost adopted in the design are compact design of reactor structure, shortening of piping, reduction of loop number, and integration of components. These design measures are expected to be realized by introducing some innovative technologies (12Cr steel with high strength, advanced elevated temperature structural design standards, three-dimensional seismic isolation, and recriticality free technology), which have the potential to be put to practical use by 2015, and by taking into account the desirable characteristics of sodium coolant (operability in a low-pressure system and excellent heat transfer characteristics).By drastically decreasing the amount of materials through these measures, it is expected that the construction cost will be reduced to below 200 000 yen/kW(electric), i.e., below two-thirds times that of light water reactors at present. The potential to realize this plant concept has been obtained through evaluations of major design issues concerning safety, structural integrity, and thermal hydraulics.
