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The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
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.”
Tengfei Zhang, Yongping Wang, E. E. Lewis, M. A. Smith, W. S. Yang, Hongchun Wu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 188 | Number 2 | November 2017 | Pages 160-174
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1350002
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A three-dimensional variational nodal method (VNM) is presented for pressurized water reactor core calculations without fuel-moderator homogenization. The nodal functional is presented and discretized to obtain response matrix equations. Within the nodes, finite elements in the x-y plane and orthogonal polynomials in z are used to approximate the spatial flux distribution. On the lateral interfaces, orthogonal polynomials are employed. On the axial interfaces, the finite elements facilitate a spatially accurate current representation that has proven to be a challenge for the method of characteristics–based two-dimensional/one-dimensional approximations which typically rely on spatial homogenization. The angular discretization utilizes an even-parity integral method within the nodes, with the integrals evaluated using high-order Chebyshev-Legendre cubature. On the lateral and axial interfaces, low-order spherical harmonics (Pn) are augmented by high-order Pn expansions to which quasi-reflected conditions are applied. With quasi-reflected conditions, the solution converges to the high-order Pn solution for an infinite lattice of identical cells with no gradient, while the low-order Pn expansions handle global gradients in both the radial and axial directions. The method is implemented in the PANX code and applied first to a number of model problems to study convergence of the space-angle approximations and then to the C5G7 benchmark problems. Multigroup Monte Carlo solutions provide reference values for eigenvalues and pin-power distributions.