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
Mathematics & Computation
Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
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.
Jack K. Boshoven
Nuclear Technology | Volume 110 | Number 1 | April 1995 | Pages 33-39
Technical Paper | Burnup Credit / Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35094
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
General Atomics (GA) is developing two legal weight truck casks for shipping spent fuel from both pressurized water reactors (PWRs) and boiling water reactors (BWRs). The GA-4 (4 PWR) and GA-9 (9 BWR) casks are high-capacity legal weight truck casks designed to transport light water reactor spent-fuel assemblies. The GA-9 cask can meet the criticality safety requirements using the “fresh fuel” assumption. To maintain a capacity of four PWR spent-fuel assemblies, the GA-4 cask uses burnup credit as part of the criticality control for initial enrichments >2.9 wt% 235U. Using the U.S. Department of Energy Burnup Credit Program as a basis, GA has performed burnup credit analysis for the GA-4 cask. The approach to calculating the minimum burnup requirement takes into account all of the key parameters affecting keff. It is based on technically sound principles and conservatively increases the burnup requirement for a given enrichment to account for all uncertainties and biases associated with the calculations.
