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
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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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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.
Igor Krivitski, Mikhail Vorotyntsev, Valentin Pyshin, Ludmila Korobeinikova
Nuclear Technology | Volume 143 | Number 3 | September 2003 | Pages 281-289
Technical Paper | Thermal Hydraulics | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3417
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The solving of ecological problems of future nuclear power is connected with the solving of long-lived radioactive waste utilization problems. This concerns primarily plutonium and minor actinides (neptunium, americium, and curium), accumulated in the spent fuel of nuclear reactors. One of the ways this can be solved is to use a fast reactor with uranium-free fuel. The physics of this type of reactor was widely investigated during the last year for the BN-800 reactor. The solutions of the most important problems were (a) a decrease in nonuniformity of the power distribution and (b) an increase of the Doppler effect. The next stage of such core investigations is an evaluation of self-protection to beyond-design accidents. Preliminary results show a high safety level of the BN-800 reactor with uranium-free fuel in unprotected loss-of-flow and unprotected transient overpower events.
