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Division Spotlight
Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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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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.
M. Harb, D. Leichtle, B.-Y. Kim, J.-P. Martins, J. G. van der Laan, J. Bergman, E. Polunovskiy, A. Serikov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 3 | April 2023 | Pages 305-319
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2109368
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
One of the advances in the test blanket module program within the ITER project in the last few years concerned the evolution of the pipe forest (PF) and bioshield plug (BP) designs. In support of the design phase, nuclear analyses to assess several responses in the fusion neutronics environment inside the port interspace (PI) with the existence of the evolved PF and BP are deemed essential. Nuclear analyses were commenced using the new PF and BP with developing the neutronics models and performing preliminary assessment of the radiation fields and shutdown dose rate (SDDR) in the PI. In this paper, the results of a full suite of nuclear analyses are discussed, which covers more configurations and radiation sources, in two plasma operational modes: on and off. For the plasma-on mode, different shielding options were examined. The results show a clear benefit of combining the installation of shielding panels on the PF enclosure with those in the BP “dogleg,” through which the pipes penetrate to the port cell area. For the plasma-off mode, the SDDR was assessed from different sources: activated components and residual LiPb layers in pipes after drainage. As maintenance operations are foreseen during the lifetime of the facility, the SDDR was also assessed for access conditions, open BP doors, and transport conditions, with PF extracted in the gallery.