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
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!
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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.
Shelly X. Li, S. D. Herrmann, K. M. Goff, M. F. Simpson, R. W. Benedict
Nuclear Technology | Volume 165 | Number 2 | February 2009 | Pages 190-199
Technical Paper | Reprocessing | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A4085
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This article summarizes the observations and analytical results from a series of bench-scale liquid cadmium cathode experiments that recovered transuranic elements together with uranium from a molten electrolyte laden with real fission products. Variable parameters such as the ratio of Pu3+/U3+ in the electrolyte, liquid cadmium cathode voltage, and feed materials were tested in the liquid cadmium cathode experiments. Actinide recovery efficiency and Pu/U ratio in the liquid cadmium cathode product under variable conditions are reported in this paper. Separation factors for actinides and rare earth elements in the molten LiCl-KCl/cadmium system are also presented.