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Division Spotlight
Thermal Hydraulics
The division provides a forum for focused technical dialogue on thermal hydraulic technology in the nuclear industry. Specifically, this will include heat transfer and fluid mechanics involved in the utilization of nuclear energy. It is intended to attract the highest quality of theoretical and experimental work to ANS, including research on basic phenomena and application to nuclear system design.
Meeting Spotlight
ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
Challenge: Accelerate utilization of simulation and experimentation.
How: Integrate experimentation and simulation to enable the development of first principles predictive simulation capabilities that are necessary to transition nuclear energy system design and licensing from reliance on experiments to reliance on modeling and simulation.
Background: In the past half century, the nuclear energy industry and regulatory agency approach to nuclear system design and licensing has relied significantly on experimental testing. This conventional paradigm embraces conservative design principles and has ensured nuclear safety, but at the cost of extensive experiments required by the current licensing process to validate modeling and simulation tools currently in use for core design. Additionally, the lengthy and complex software quality assurance process required by the licensing authority prevents many from using newly-available models or tools, thus further delaying the use of new simulation tools that are closer to a true predictive capability. These two issues combined deter licensing authorities from trusting the predictive capabilities of software and increases the reliance on new experiments.
The challenge thus becomes to develop and improve versatile predictive simulation capabilities that can easily integrate new models without a lengthy re-qualification process, while designing and developing a set of broad, challenging, and well-instrumented experiments that can clearly demonstrate the predictive capability of the new simulation tools and identify the areas in which the tools need improvement. Significant computational challenges exist in quantifying the impact of uncertainties on nuclear reactor performance in a multiphysics context.
Software development standards have increased significantly over the years, but the quality assurance process remains uneven. Legacy codes have been grandfathered into the licensing regime, while new codes require a significant quality assurance process, dissuading attempts to integrate advancements. At the same time, experiments have become so cost-prohibitive that laboratories and industry rely on old experiments that often lack the detail and precision needed to validate advanced first principles simulation capabilities.
Addressing this challenge requires a greater trust in first principles modeling and simulation capabilities and the definition of simpler guidelines in the development of quality-assured software. Additionally, high-fidelity software should be used to design a set of broad critical experiments in order to gain support in the construction of such facilities. A new paradigm that closely integrates these experiments and predictive simulations for the design and licensing process is needed.
Last modified May 12, 2017, 1:23am CDT