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
Reactor Physics
The division's objectives are to promote the advancement of knowledge and understanding of the fundamental physical phenomena characterizing nuclear reactors and other nuclear systems. The division encourages research and disseminates information through meetings and publications. Areas of technical interest include nuclear data, particle interactions and transport, reactor and nuclear systems analysis, methods, design, validation and operating experience and standards. The Wigner Award heads the awards program.
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.
Lawrence N. Oji, William R. Wilmarth, David T. Hobbs
Nuclear Technology | Volume 169 | Number 2 | February 2010 | Pages 143-149
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management and Disposal | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9359
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
To evaluate the nuclear criticality safety in a typical nuclear waste storage tank, a study was initiated to measure the affinity of granular solids for plutonium, neptunium, and uranium from synthetic salt solutions and actual nuclear waste supernatant liquor. Granular solids such as activated carbon, hematite, and sodium phosphates, if present as sludge components in nuclear waste storage tanks, have been found to be capable of precipitating/sorbing actinides like plutonium, neptunium, and uranium from nuclear waste storage tank supernatant liquor.Our results show that the removal of plutonium and neptunium from simulants by tank solid sludge components may be due to the presence of the activated carbon and metal oxides. Thus, the potential may exist for the accumulation of fissile materials in nuclear waste storage tanks containing trace levels of these radionuclides during lengthy nuclear waste storage and processing.
