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Young Members Group
The Young Members Group works to encourage and enable all young professional members to be actively involved in the efforts and endeavors of the Society at all levels (Professional Divisions, ANS Governance, Local Sections, etc.) as they transition from the role of a student to the role of a professional. It sponsors non-technical workshops and meetings that provide professional development and networking opportunities for young professionals, collaborates with other Divisions and Groups in developing technical and non-technical content for topical and national meetings, encourages its members to participate in the activities of the Groups and Divisions that are closely related to their professional interests as well as in their local sections, introduces young members to the rules and governance structure of the Society, and nominates young professionals for awards and leadership opportunities available to members.
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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.”
Steven E. Aumeier, Bulent Alpay, John C. Lee, A. Ziya Akcasu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 153 | Number 2 | June 2006 | Pages 101-123
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2599
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present probabilistic techniques that make synergistic use of available process information for diagnosis and detection of component fault manifestation in a multicomponent system. We begin by describing the motivation for using probabilistic techniques for systems diagnostics and then define probabilistic expressions that embody the diagnostics knowledge of interest. We show that a combination of a Bayesian expression with the solution to the Chapman-Kolmogoroff equation contains the diagnostic information of interest while explicitly making use of available process information including plant data or measurements, mathematical system models, and individual component reliability data. Given these probabilistic expressions, we introduce a practical means of obtaining the necessary constituent probability density functions corresponding to feasible component transitions via an adaptive Kalman filtering formulation. To demonstrate the consolidated probabilistic technique, we consider a low-order model of a balance of plant of a boiling water reactor, represented by 11 system variables, 9 component characteristics, and 5 observations. We simulate 5 to 10% degradations in two components subject to 1% signal noise in two different transient events. Our test calculations indicate that the proposed algorithm is able to provide correct fault detection and diagnosis of the faulted components and fault magnitudes, together with a rank-ordered likelihood of the binary faults.