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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.
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!
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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.”
Qicang Shen, Brendan Kochunas
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 7 | July 2023 | Pages 1364-1385
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2159276
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Solving initial value problems with high-order methods receives considerable attention in many fields because these methods can potentially improve the accuracy of the simulation results with lower computational cost than low-order methods. Most methods, however, are either complicated to implement or unstable when the order of accuracy is high. The spectral deferred correction (SDC) method is a stable, robust, and efficient high-order time-integration scheme capable of an arbitrary order of accuracy. In this paper, we apply the SDC method to solve the initial value problem of the point kinetics equations (PKEs). For our implementation, we show that SDC is -stable for orders up to eight and the order of accuracy is verified for PKE problems with a range of different reactivities. A fifth-order SDC method was then implemented to solve the exact PKE in the transient multilevel method of MPACT. The error from solutions of the exact PKE with SDC is shown to be negligible. The investigations made here can provide the foundation for future investigations simulating the neutron transport problem using the high-order methods for both spatial discretization and time integration.