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 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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Nuclear Science and Engineering
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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.
Sarah Scarboro, Nolan Hertel, Eric Burgett, Rebecca Howell, Armin Ansari
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 169-172
Dose/Dose Rate | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 1) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9120
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the event of a terrorist act involving a radiological agent, internal contamination due to inhalation is a potential health threat. When a large population is potentially impacted, there is need for methodology to serve as an initial screening or triage tool to rapidly identify individuals with significant amounts of internal contamination and to assist in prioritizing collection of large numbers of bioassay samples needed in such an incident. Common handheld radiation detectors and medical devices are tools that can effectively and rapidly screen a large number of people for internal contamination due to gamma-emitting isotopes. This work investigated the use of a common medical device, a thyroid uptake system or thyroid probe, in screening for internal contamination in individuals. The response of a thyroid uptake system in such a situation can be estimated by using a validated Monte Carlo model of the thyroid uptake system and various human phantoms. A computational model of the thyroid uptake system was built using the Los Alamos Particle Transport Code, MCNP Version 5. The validation of this computational model was demonstrated by comparisons to a series of benchmark measurements using the actual device and six isotopes with a range of gamma-ray emission energies.
