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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2025
Nuclear Technology
April 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.”
Workshop
Sunday, September 25, 2022|1:00–5:00PM PDT|Grand Pacific AB
ADVANTG is a software package that generates variance reduction parameters (space- and energy-dependent weight windows and biased source probabilities) that can substantially improve the convergence rate of fixed-source neutron and photon radiation transport simulations using MCNP. ADVANTG implements the Consistent Adjoint Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) method to accelerate individual tallies and the Forward-Weighted CADIS (FW-CADIS) method to obtain nearly uniform statistical precision across multiple tallies and large mesh tallies. Additionally, ADVANTG 3.2.0 has the capability to produce variance reduction parameters based on the Multi Step CADIS (MS-CADIS) methodology for optimal calculations of delayed gamma radiation fields such as the shutdown dose rate (SDDR) in fusion facilities.
The workshop will discuss the theoretical background of the methods implemented in ADVANTG before moving on to a demonstration of the use of CADIS and FW-CADIS methods on test cases. The workshop will also include a tutorial on how to visualize the discretized geometry, source and discrete ordinates solutions using the open-source VisIt software (https://wci.llnl.gov/codes/visit/). Common issues when using variance reduction will be discussed alongside some best practices and suggestions for ADVANTG workflows.
ADVANTG has been used in a variety of radiation transport applications at ORNL as well as other organizations. Some recent advanced applications will be presented and discussed, including the use of ADVANTG for pressure vessel fluence predictions, neutron fluence and radiation heating in LWR concrete bioshields, and in the workflow for determining SDDR in the JET and ITER fusion facilities.
To join the conversation, you must be logged in and registered for the meeting.
Register NowLog In