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
Aerospace Nuclear Science & Technology
Organized to promote the advancement of knowledge in the use of nuclear science and technologies in the aerospace application. Specialized nuclear-based technologies and applications are needed to advance the state-of-the-art in aerospace design, engineering and operations to explore planetary bodies in our solar system and beyond, plus enhance the safety of air travel, especially high speed air travel. Areas of interest will include but are not limited to the creation of nuclear-based power and propulsion systems, multifunctional materials to protect humans and electronic components from atmospheric, space, and nuclear power system radiation, human factor strategies for the safety and reliable operation of nuclear power and propulsion plants by non-specialized personnel and more.
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.
M. Sakuma, R. Kozma, M. Kitamura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 1 | January 1996 | Pages 86-99
Technical Paper | Reactor Operation | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35201
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Fractal analysis is applied in a variety of research fields to characterize nonstationary data. Here, fractal analysis is used as a tool of characterization in time series. The fractal dimension is calculated by Higuchi’s method, and the effect of small data size on accuracy is studied in detail. Three types of fractal-based anomaly indicators are adopted: (a) the fractal dimension, (b) the error of the fractal dimension, and (c) the chisquare value of the linear fitting of the fractal curve in the wave number domain. Fractal features of time series can be characterized by introducing these three measures. The proposed method is applied to various simulated fractal time series with ramp, random, and periodic noise anomalies and also to neutron detector signals acquired in a nuclear reactor. Fractal characterization can successfully supplement conventional signal analysis methods especially if nonstationary and non-Gaussian features of the signal become important.
