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
Nuclear Installations Safety
Devoted specifically to the safety of nuclear installations and the health and safety of the public, this division seeks a better understanding of the role of safety in the design, construction and operation of nuclear installation facilities. The division also promotes engineering and scientific technology advancement associated with the safety of such facilities.
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.”
Edward T. Cheng, Robert W. Conn
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 62 | Number 4 | April 1977 | Pages 601-616
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE77-A15204
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The influence of design variations, such as the percentage of structural material in a tritium breeding zone or the enrichment of lithium in 6Li, on such important controlled thermonuclear reactor parameters as the tritium breeding ratio and the total nuclear energy produced has been studied using variational techniques for two different but general blanket designs. The first design uses liquid lithium as both coolant and breeding material, while the second uses a helium coolant and a solid-lithium-bearing compound as the tritium breeder. A variational technique based on variational interpolation is the primary computational tool, and it is shown that for linear perturbations in the transport operator and for a fixed source, only forward flux calculations are required to implement the variational interpolation approach. No adjoint functions are required, while any number of response functionals can be investigated. For both blanket designs, the influence of the choice of structural material, such as stainless-steel, molybdenum, niobium, vanadium, and aluminum structures, has been studied. The role of beryllium as a neutron multiplier with a solid breeder blanket is studied, and an optimum beryllium thickness is found that maximizes the breeding ratio. The influence of using graphite or the structural material as a neutron reflector and the effect of lithium burnup are also studied. It is found that for a given percentage of structural material in the tritium breeding zones, vanadium-structured systems achieve the highest breeding ratios, while molybdenum-structured systems produce the highest value of total nuclear heating. The effects of lithium burnup are small.
