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Robotics & Remote Systems
The Mission of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division is to promote the development and application of immersive simulation, robotics, and remote systems for hazardous environments for the purpose of reducing hazardous exposure to individuals, reducing environmental hazards and reducing the cost of performing work.
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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.”
Jaeuk Im, Myung Jin Jeong, Namjae Choi, Kyung Min Kim, Hyoung Kyu Cho, Han Gyu Joo
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 1743-1757
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2143209
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A multiphysics analysis system for neutronics/thermomechanical/heat pipe thermal analysis of heat pipe–cooled micro reactors was developed using the PRAGMA code as the neutronics engine. PRAGMA, which was developed as a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based continuous-energy Monte Carlo code for power reactor applications, now has an extended geometry package to handle geometries with unstructured meshes generated by Coreform Cubit. The NVIDIA ray-tracing engine OptiX has been exploited for efficient neutron transport on unstructured mesh geometry. On the multiphysics side, the open-source computational fluid dynamics tool OpenFOAM and one-dimensional heat pipe analysis code ANLHTP have been adopted. The manager-worker system based on the message passing interface dynamic process management model enables efficient coupling of codes employing different parallelization schemes. With all the features, the multiphysics analysis of the 60-deg symmetrical sector model of the MegaPower three-dimensional core was performed for normal operation and heat pipe–failed conditions. The multiphysics coupling run time was about 2.5 h, in which the Monte Carlo simulation employing more than 10 billion histories was performed within half an hour on a single rack of computing nodes mounted with 24 NVIDIA Quadro GPUs. Accordingly, this demonstrates the soundness and robustness of the tightly coupled three-way multiphysics analysis system.