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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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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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.
Chia-Lin W. Hsu, James A. Ritter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 116 | Number 3 | December 1996 | Pages 360-365
Technical Note | Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35290
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The combined use of nitric and formic acids, in lieu of formic acid alone, to reduce H2 emissions during the treatment of high-level radioactive waste sludge was investigated. The H2 generation can be mitigated substantially by substituting a fraction of formic acid with nitric acid as the required acid source, and then using formic acid as the required reductant source. The peak H2 generation rate was reduced by more than a factor of 2, and a more gradual rise in the H2 evolution resulted. However, the addition of mercury to the sludge increased the evolution of H2 as did increasing the amount of nitric acid used and the rate of addition of the formic acid source. Overall, these results provided clear insight into what controlled the evolution of H2 from high-level waste sludge and a means of mitigating it.
