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
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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.
Marcos P. de Abreu
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 2 | November 2009 | Pages 369-372
Neutron Measurements | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 2) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9211
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this technical note we report on a slight but important modification in a recently developed backscattered neutron-based void fraction evaluation scheme for slab materials, and we describe an add-on numerical scheme for computing total (direct plus diffuse) neutron transmission through a test slab. In the void fraction evaluation scheme, the broad neutron beam consists of a monodirectional (singular), normally incident component and a smooth (regular), angularly continuous component, i.e., a mixed neutron beam. Once the void fraction of the test slab has been evaluated, the diffuse component of the angular flux of transmitted neutrons can be computed from an accurate spherical harmonics-discrete ordinates solution of the neutron beam transport problem defined in a reduced slab domain (the direct component is rather straightforward to compute). The add-on scheme described here can be used to evaluate the amount of neutrons that escape from the slab through the back side. Numerical results are given to illustrate the usefulness of our add-on scheme in neutron shielding studies.
