ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
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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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
June 2025
Nuclear Technology
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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.
Bassam I. Shamoun, Michael L. Corradini
Nuclear Technology | Volume 120 | Number 2 | November 1997 | Pages 158-170
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35424
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The thermal interaction of certain molten materials such as Al2O3 with water results in vapor explosions with very high (supercritical) pressures and propagation velocities. A quasi-steady-state analysis and a transient analysis of a supercritical vapor explosion in one-dimensional multiphase flow were applied to analyze experimental data of an Al2O3-water fuel/coolant interaction obtained from the KROTOS 26, 28, 29, and 30 tests. The shock adiabatic thermodynamic model and the TEXAS mechanistic model were used to perform this analysis. The predicted results of the initial vapor void fraction and explosion conversion ratio from both models, together with the estimated experimental results, for the KROTOS 26 test were compared.
