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
Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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.
Abdellatif M. Yacout, Won-Sik Yang, Gerard L. Hofman, Yuri Orechwa
Nuclear Technology | Volume 115 | Number 1 | July 1996 | Pages 61-72
Technical Paper | Nuclear Fuel Cycle | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35275
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Integral parameters of reactor fuel pins are usually measured after long periods of irradiation, where each period can extend over a number of irradiation cycles. Examples of these parameters include cladding diametral strain and parameters involved in the evaluation of fuel/cladding chemical interaction and fuel restructuring. Analysis of these parameters requires knowledge of calculated irradiation parameters, which can vary between irradiation cycles and within the cycles. Irradiation temperature is one such parameter. A calculated weighted average temperature that takes into account the fluctuations in temperature between irradiation cycles is introduced. The work discusses the justification for using this temperature and a methodology for its validation. The methodology is based on comparing calculated average temperatures with temperatures inferred from the postirradiation examination of restructured binary metallic fuel pins in the Experimental Breeder Reactor II. The analysis shows reasonable agreement between the two temperatures. The peak irradiation temperatures, which are usually used in the analysis, were out of the range of the temperatures inferred from the experimental observations, showing the importance of using the average temperature.
