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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy
The mission of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy Division (NNPD) is to promote the peaceful use of nuclear technology while simultaneously preventing the diversion and misuse of nuclear material and technology through appropriate safeguards and security, and promotion of nuclear nonproliferation policies. To achieve this mission, the objectives of the NNPD are to: Promote policy that discourages the proliferation of nuclear technology and material to inappropriate entities. Provide information to ANS members, the technical community at large, opinion leaders, and decision makers to improve their understanding of nuclear nonproliferation issues. Become a recognized technical resource on nuclear nonproliferation, safeguards, and security issues. Serve as the integration and coordination body for nuclear nonproliferation activities for the ANS. Work cooperatively with other ANS divisions to achieve these objective nonproliferation policies.
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.
Ali Uludogan, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 109 | Number 2 | February 1995 | Pages 171-186
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT109-171
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A theoretical model has been developed for molten metal/water interactions by using a semiempirical heat transfer correlation and a mass transfer analogy to predict the metal ignition threshold temperatures for aluminum and zirconium. The predictions of the aluminum and zirconium metal temperature responses are studied to identify self-propagating chemical reactions that lead to metal ignition for various metal particle sizes and initial temperatures. The results showed that the ignition of the aluminum metal is possible when the aluminum oxide layer remains in the liquid phase until the metal temperature reaches its oxide layer solidification temperature under highly transient conditions. For both metals, the ignition temperature increased with a larger size of the metal particle, with zirconium requiring qualitatively larger temperatures for ignitions. It was observed that the effect of the water temperature strongly depends on where the chemical reaction front may actually be located.
