ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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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.
Gustavo Alonso-Vargas, José L. Montes, Mario R. Perusquía
Nuclear Technology | Volume 110 | Number 1 | April 1995 | Pages 86-92
Fission Reactor | Burnup Credit | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35098
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Advanced fuel designs have been developed with the aim of improving fuel cycle efficiency. With this idea, moderator distribution in boiling water reactor fuel assemblies has been improved. The current work analyzes two 9×9 fuel assemblies with different inner channel designs. The first design corresponds to an actual assembly, whereas the second is proposed with the aim of making comparisons between their performances. The former design is an internal parallelepipedal water channel, and the latter is an internal cylindrical water channel whose diameter is equal to one side of the first. It is observed that the former assembly has a better burnup. Reloads for Laguna Verde Nuclear Power Plant are simulated for each design. Better operational limits are obtained by using the latter assembly. The increase in the amount of water yields a more uniform burnup, although as shown in this study, this fact does not necessarily improve the plant operational limits.
