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The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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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.”
Gabriele Grassi
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 155 | Number 2 | February 2007 | Pages 208-222
Technical Paper | Mathematics and Computation, Supercomputing, Reactor Physics and Nuclear and Biological Applications | doi.org/10.13182/NSE07-A2657
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new space-angle multigrid technique has been developed to accelerate the free inner transport iterations based upon the method of characteristics (MOC). We present a two-level scheme that consists of a fine level on which the MOC transport calculation is performed and a more coarsely discretized phase-space in which a low-order problem is solved as an acceleration step. A flux-volume homogenization technique is employed to define the coarse-level cross sections. This entails the nonlinearity of the scheme. Restriction and prolongation operators are defined between the two levels. After each fine transport iteration, a low-order transport problem is iteratively solved on the homogenized grid. A coarser angular representation is used within an MOC-like framework. Discontinuity factors are employed to reconstruct the scalar incoming and outgoing currents on each region of the coarse discretization. The solution of the aforementioned low-order problem is used to correct the angular moments of the flux resulting from the previous free transport sweep. A complete description of the low-order operator and of the grid-to-grid transfer operators is given. A further application of the method to the acceleration of outer transport iterations is also presented. In order to test the effectiveness of this method, numerical tests for given benchmark geometries have been performed. Results are discussed.