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Fusion Energy
This division promotes the development and timely introduction of fusion energy as a sustainable energy source with favorable economic, environmental, and safety attributes. The division cooperates with other organizations on common issues of multidisciplinary fusion science and technology, conducts professional meetings, and disseminates technical information in support of these goals. Members focus on the assessment and resolution of critical developmental issues for practical fusion energy applications.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
Bruno Turcksin, Jean C. Ragusa, Wolfgang Bangerth
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 3 | July 2010 | Pages 305-319
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-34
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We investigate application of goal-oriented mesh adaptivity to the SPN multigroup equations. This technique utilizes knowledge of the computational goal and combines it with mesh adaptivity to accurately and rapidly compute quantities of interest. Specifically, the local error is weighted by the importance of a given cell toward the computational goal, resulting in appropriate goal-oriented error estimates. Even though this approach requires the solution of an adjoint (dual) problem, driven by a specific source term for a given quantity of interest, the work reported here clearly shows the benefits of such a method.We demonstrate the level of accuracy this method can achieve using two-dimensional and three-dimensional numerical test cases for one-group and two-group models and compare results with more traditional mesh refinement and uniformly refined meshes. The test cases consider situations in which the radiative flux of a source is shielded and are designed to prototypically explore the range of conditions under which our methods improve on other refinement algorithms. In particular, they model strong contrasts in material properties, a situation ubiquitous in nuclear engineering.