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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.
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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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Fusion Science and Technology
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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.”
Jon T. Van Lew, Alice Ying, Mohamed Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | September 2015 | Pages 288-294
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-937
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pebble-scale models of the interactions inside packed beds are critical for determining alterations to thermophysical properties in the wake of changes to the packed bed due to cracking, sintering, or creep-deformation of the ceramic pebbles. Simultaneously, the helium purge gas flow through the pebble bed can change; while not specifically playing a role as coolant, it does have an impact on the thermal transport in the volumetrically heated bed. We present numerical tools that are capable of resolving pebble-scale interactions coupled to bed-scale thermofluid flow. The new computational techniques are used to show that maximum temperatures in pebble beds do not increase drastically in spite of the significant amount of cracking induced in our numerical model. Furthermore a complete flow field of helium moving through densely packed spheres is modeled with the lattice-Boltzmann method to reveal the strong effect of slow-moving helium gas on flattening temperature profiles in pebble beds with nuclear heating.