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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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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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.
A. K. Sengupta, J. Banerjee, T. Jarvis, T. R. G. Kutty, K. Ravi, S. Majumdar
Nuclear Technology | Volume 142 | Number 3 | June 2003 | Pages 260-269
Technical Paper | Fuel Cycle and Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3388
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Hyperstoichiometric uranium-plutonium mixed carbide fuel (U0.3Pu0.7)C1+x has been the driver fuel for the sodium-cooled Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) at Kalpakkam, India. The existing core is being slowly expanded by substituting the earlier fuel with hyperstoichiometric (U0.45Pu0.55)C1+x fuel for operation of the reactor at full power [40 MW(thermal)] and at higher linear heat rating of the fuel. To evaluate the fuel in terms of its in-reactor performance, some of the important out-of-pile thermophysical and thermomechanical property data like the coefficient of thermal expansion, thermal diffusivity, thermal conductivity, and hot hardness have been generated as a function of temperature. The out-of-pile chemical compatibility of the fuel with Type 316 stainless steel (20% cold-worked) cladding material has also been established experimentally. From the data generated in these measurements, it has been concluded that with this fuel the reactor could be operated at full power with a fuel linear heat rating of 400 W/cm. Out-of-pile compatibility experiments indicate that carburization of the clad by carbon transfer from the fuel would not be severe to cause any breach of clad during the residence time of the fuel in the reactor.