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
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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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Apr 2025
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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.
Yen-Fu Chen, Yen-Kung Lin, Rong-Jiun Sheu, Shiang-Huei Jiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 2 | November 2009 | Pages 508-512
Shielding | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 2) / Decontamination/Decommissioning | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9234
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The paper aims to estimate the residual activity in the concrete shielding of a nuclear power plant (NPP) after 40 yr of design service life and to determine if the whole massive concrete shielding must be treated as radioactive waste for future decommissioning. The process was a combination of experiment and calculation. Nonradioactive concrete samples collected from the Lungmen NPP were measured to determine the initial concentrations of major, minor, and trace elements in the concrete shielding by neutron activation analysis, inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry, and elemental analysis. The neutron flux distribution and depth-dependent cross sections, which were generated by SAS1, in the 60-cm-thick reactor shielding wall and 200-cm-thick dry well wall of the Lungmen NPP were fed to the ORIGEN-S code to calculate the activity distribution in the concrete shielding after 40 yr of reactor full-power operation. Comparing the activity with the exemption levels, it was found that the dry well wall of the Lungmen NPP can be handled as construction waste for immediate decommissioning. However, most of the reactor shielding wall must be treated as radioactive waste even after a 25-yr cooling time.
