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.
Brian S. Triplett, Samim Anghaie, Morgan C. White
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 1 | April 2010 | Pages 80-89
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 2008 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants / Radiation Measurements and Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9447
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Verification and validation (V&V) of nuclear data are critical to the accuracy of both stochastic and deterministic particle transport codes. To effectively test a set of nuclear data, the data must be applied to a wide variety of transport problems. Performing this task in a timely, efficient manner is tedious. The nuclear data team at Los Alamos National Laboratory in collaboration with the University of Florida has developed a methodology to automate the process of nuclear data V&V. This automated V&V process can efficiently test a number of data libraries using well-defined benchmark experiments, such as those in the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Experiment Project. The process is implemented through an integrated set of Python scripts. Material and geometry data are read from an existing medium or given directly by the user to generate a benchmark experiment template file. The user specifies the choice of benchmark templates, codes, and libraries to form a V&V project. The Python scripts automatically generate input decks for multiple transport codes, run and monitor individual jobs, and parse the relevant output. The output can then be used to generate reports directly or can be stored in a database for later analysis. This methodology eases the burden on the user by reducing the amount of time and effort required for obtaining and compiling calculation results. The resource savings by using this automated methodology could potentially be an enabling technology for more sophisticated data studies, such as nuclear data uncertainty quantification. Once deployed, this tool will allow the nuclear data community to more thoroughly test data libraries leading to higher-fidelity data in the future.