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Division Spotlight
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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.
Hiromi Maruyama, Junichi Koyama, Motoo Aoyama, Kazuya Ishii, Atsushi Zukeran, Takashi Kiguchi, Akira Nishimura
Nuclear Technology | Volume 118 | Number 1 | April 1997 | Pages 3-13
Technical Paper | Kiyose Birthday Anniversary Special / Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35351
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A core analysis system has been developed for the recent advanced designs of boiling water reactors. This system consists of a fuel assembly analysis code VMONT and a three-dimensional core simulator COSNEX. To cope with heterogeneous structures found in the recent high-performance fuel, VMONT employs a Monte Carlo neutron transport calculation method. COSNEX is based on a three-group nodal expansion method to treat spectral interactions among fuel assemblies. Both codes are vectorized to meet timing requirements as design tools. The analysis system is verified by the tracking of recent plant operations. Although the analyzed cores are highly heterogeneous in the multienrichment configuration, the system gives sufficient accuracy both in critical eigenvalues and thermal power distributions.