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
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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.
Sanjay Krishnarao Sali, Donal Marshal Noronha, Hemakant Ramkrishna Mhatre, Murlidhar Anna Mahajan, Keshav Chander, Suresh Kumar Aggarwal, Venkatarama Venugopal
Nuclear Technology | Volume 151 | Number 3 | September 2005 | Pages 289-296
Technical Paper | Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT05-A3651
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A novel methodology has been developed for the recovery of Pu from different types of waste solutions generated during various operations involved in the chemical quality control/assurance of nuclear fuels. The method is based on the precipitation of Pu as ammonium plutonium(III)-oxalate and involves the adjustment of acidity of the Pu solution to 1 N, the addition of ascorbic acid (0.05 M) to reduce Pu to Pu(III), followed by the addition of (NH4)2SO4 (0.5 M) and a stoichiometric amount of saturated oxalic acid maintaining a 0.2 M excess of oxalic acid concentration in the supernatant. The precipitate was characterized by X-ray powder diffraction and thermal and chemical analysis and was found to have the composition NH4Pu(C2O4)23H2O. This compound can be easily decomposed to PuO2 on heating in air at 823 K. Decontamination factors of U, Fe, and Cr determined showed quantitative removal of these ions during the precipitation of Pu as ammonium plutonium(III)-oxalate.A semiautomatic assembly based on the transfer of solutions by suction arrangement was designed and fabricated for processing large volumes of Pu solution. This assembly reduced the corrosion of the glove-box material and offered the advantage of lower radiation exposure to the working personnel.
