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Division Spotlight
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.
T. M. Krishnamoorthy, S. N. Joshi, G. R. Doshi, R. N. Nair
Nuclear Technology | Volume 104 | Number 3 | December 1993 | Pages 351-357
Technical Paper | Special Issue on Waste Management / Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34896
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Leach characteristics of some typical nuclides such as cesium, strontium, cobalt, I−, and CO3−2 from ordinary portland cement waste forms have been studied using the ISO test method and radiotracers of the respective nuclides, i.e., 134Cs, 85Sr, 60Co, 131I, and 14C. The leach studies suggest a rapid release of radioactivity in the beginning (fast component) followed by slow release for long periods of time (slow component). A mathematical model has been simulated to describe the leaching kinetics of these nuclides from the cement matrix. The effective diffusion coefficient Deff is computed from the two componental diffusion coefficients, and the retardation factor (α) for a nuclide is evaluated from a knowledge of the radioactivity distribution in the aqueous and solid phase at equilibrium. The product αDeff for all the nuclides studied has been found to be approximately constant and is equal to the intrinsic diffusion coefficient in the cement matrix. The net fractional release of different radionuclides from cement waste form showed a decreasing pattern, i.e., 134Cs > 131I > 85Sr > 14Cr > 60Co indicating the largest diffusion coefficient for cesium as 10−2 cm2/day and the least for 14C as 3 × 10−8 cm2/day.