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.
Explore membership for yourself or for your organization.
Conference Spotlight
2026 Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
August 24–27, 2026
Dallas, TX|Hilton Anatole
Latest Magazine Issues
Aug 2026
Jan 2026
2026
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
September 2026
Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2026
Latest News
ORNL, Rutherford Energy Ventures launch fusion partnership
Fusion Upscaled Leveraged Consortia for Rapid Acceleration (FULCRA) is the new public-private partnership between Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Rutherford Energy Ventures, a fusion consultancy company headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. FULCRA intends to create shared fusion test bed infrastructure at ORNL to serve as a design and funding model for similar test facilities at other national laboratories.
William Ziehm, L. Dale Thomas
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S12-S20
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2323242
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Missions to the Kuiper belt have previously been carried out only as flybys and with very small payloads. Investigating launch windows for Kuiper belt missions supported by centrifugal nuclear thermal propulsion (CNTP) contributes to defining its operational use case. Results indicate that CNTP enables rendezvous missions to the Kuiper belt, both with direct transfer trajectories or planetary gravity assist trajectories, although there are many challenges to making these mission architectures feasible. The direct trajectories have transfer times of roughly 14 to 16 years while combining CNTP with gravity assists from Jupiter could lower transfer time to as low as 10 to 12 years to Kuiper belt objects such as Pluto and Quaoar. These missions are then shown to inform the architecture of the CNTP injection stage vehicle, which can be supported by heavy and super-heavy commercial launch vehicles with a single launch. Last, drawbacks of the mission and vehicle architectures are given that impose limits on the use case for CNTP on these missions.