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Devoted to all aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle including waste management, worldwide. Division specific areas of interest and involvement include uranium conversion and enrichment; fuel fabrication, management (in-core and ex-core) and recycle; transportation; safeguards; high-level, low-level and mixed waste management and disposal; public policy and program management; decontamination and decommissioning environmental restoration; and excess weapons materials disposition.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
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Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
R. T. Evans, D. G. Cacuci
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 2 | October 2012 | Pages 216-222
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-110
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We have implemented the first-order adjoint sensitivity analysis procedure (ASAP) into the three-dimensional parallel radiation transport code system Denovo, a module of the SCALE software suite. In particular, we used a Krylov-based approach to compute the solution to the inhomogeneous adjoint systems occurring in the ASAP. Our implementation, as a component of Denovo's scalable framework, should allow the efficient computation of cross section and atomic number density sensitivity coefficients for critical systems in a massively parallel fashion. We have constructed a proof that the Krylov-based approach converges to a unique solution and compared its computational requirements with the standard algorithm used in the neutron transport community. In addition, we performed a verification of our ASAP implementation on the Godiva experimental benchmark. We found the new approach to be an order of magnitude faster than the standard algorithm in this benchmark.
