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.”
Kirk A. Mathews, Charles R. Brennan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 126 | Number 3 | July 1997 | Pages 264-281
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE97-A24480
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The exponential characteristic (EC) method is one of a family of nonlinear spatial quadratures for discrete ordinates radiation transport that are positive and at least second-order accurate and provide accurate results for deep-penetration problems using coarse meshes. We use a split-cell methodology to adapt the method to unstructured grids of arbitrarily shaped and oriented triangular cells that provide efficient representation of curved surfaces. Exponential representations of the flux entering through a cell edge and of the scattering source within a cell are constructed to match average values and first moments passed from the adjacent cell (or from the boundary conditions) or obtained from the angular quadrature of the directional flux spatial moments in the previous iteration (or from an initial guess). The resulting one- and two-dimensional nonlinear rootsolving problems are efficiently solved using Newton’s method with an accurate starting approximation. Improved algorithms, presented here, have increased the efficiency of the method by a factor of 10 as compared to an initial report. The EC method now costs only twice as much per cell as does the linear characteristic method but can be accurate with many fewer cells. Numerical testing shows the EC method to be robust and effective.