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
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
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.
Akira Inoue, Masanobu Futakuchi, Makoto Yagi, Toru Mitsutake, Shin-Ichi Morooka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 112 | Number 3 | December 1995 | Pages 388-400
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35165
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Void fraction measurement tests for boiling water reactor (BWR) simulated nuclear fuel assemblies have been conducted using an X-ray computed tomography scanner. There are two types of fuel assemblies concerning water rods. One fuel assembly has two water rods; the other has one large water rod. The effects of the water rods on radial void fraction distributions are measured within the fuel assemblies. The results show that the water rod effect does not make a large difference in void fraction distribution. The subchannel analysis codes COBRA/BWR and THERMIT-2 were compared with subchannel-averaged void fractions. The prediction accuracy of COBRA/BWR and THERMIT-2 for the subchannel-averaged void fraction was Δα = —3.6%, σ = 4.8% and Δ α = —4.1%, σ = 4.5%, respectively, where Δ α is the average of the difference between measured and calculated values. The subchannel analysis codes are highly applicable for the prediction of a two-phase flow distribution within BWR fuel assemblies.
