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Accelerator Applications
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
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.”
Stefan Meyer, Ivan Otic, Xu Cheng
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 184 | Number 3 | November 2016 | Pages 377-387
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE16-6
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the framework of a description of melt pool heat transfer under severe accident conditions, we introduce a computational fluid dynamics approach for the phase change based on the phase-field method. The approach is derived using the formalism of irreversible thermodynamics and depends on a phenomenological expression for the free energy of binary eutectic alloys. The free energy is constructed to describe sharp interfaces on sufficiently small length scales and is capable of representing the appearance of mushy layers in a volume-averaged large-scale perspective. In particular, a dynamic calculation procedure for the diffuse interface width is introduced based on free energy minimization. Numerical simulations using this approach are performed and compared with experimental and numerical results from the literature. These comparisons demonstrate that the new model improves numerical simulation results and is able to describe the dynamics of sharp and diffuse interfaces.