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
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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June 2025
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.
T. E. Booth, K. C. Kelley, S. S. McCready
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 765-767
MC Calculations | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9303
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Dxtran is a deterministic transport method typically used for increasing the sampling in a spherical region that would otherwise not be adequately sampled because the probability of scattering toward the region is often very small. Essentially, the dxtran method splits the particle into two pieces at each source or collision point: a piece that arrives (without further collisions) at the dxtran sphere and a piece that does not. One difficulty with the dxtran method is that it can introduce a large weight fluctuation between particles colliding just before the sphere and particles colliding after crossing the sphere. New work shows that it is possible to mitigate this difficulty by extending the dxtran sphere concept to a set of nested dxtran spheres. Each dxtran sphere then shields its interior from particles whose weights are too large so that weights are more commensurate with their locations. Shielding against the large weights not only increases the efficiency of the calculation but the reliability as well. The effectiveness of the technique in MCNP was demonstrated on a 1-km air transport problem and on a concrete duct problem.