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
Materials Science & Technology
The objectives of MSTD are: promote the advancement of materials science in Nuclear Science Technology; support the multidisciplines which constitute it; encourage research by providing a forum for the presentation, exchange, and documentation of relevant information; promote the interaction and communication among its members; and recognize and reward its members for significant contributions to the field of materials science in nuclear technology.
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.
Denis Alexandre
Nuclear Technology | Volume 115 | Number 2 | August 1996 | Pages 138-145
Technical Paper | Characterization of Radioactive Waste in France / Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35259
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Characterization is the sum of measurements and tests applied to a waste package to prove that all its characteristics meet the acceptance requirements drawn up by the authorities in charge of final disposal. If waste producers are in charge of acceptance file presentation, specialized laboratories are involved in testing operations and data interpretation. Because of their knowledge of wastes and the conditioning matrices they have developed, the people in charge of characterization are placed at an interface between producers, repository managers, safety authorities, and research laboratories. Some examples drawn from different fields of activity are given here to illustrate this remarkable situation.
