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Isotopes & Radiation
Members are devoted to applying nuclear science and engineering technologies involving isotopes, radiation applications, and associated equipment in scientific research, development, and industrial processes. Their interests lie primarily in education, industrial uses, biology, medicine, and health physics. Division committees include Analytical Applications of Isotopes and Radiation, Biology and Medicine, Radiation Applications, Radiation Sources and Detection, and Thermal Power Sources.
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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.”
Muhammad Rizki Oktavian, Ugur Mertyurek, Yunlin Xu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 8 | August 2023 | Pages 2072-2085
Technical papers from: PHYSOR 2022 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2162790
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Current plans and efforts of reactor operators and vendors to include extended-enrichment (EE) fuel and accident-tolerant fuel (ATF) in current reactor fleets motivate the study of these changes in reactor physics analysis. This work uses the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s core simulator PARCS to do the core calculation and the SCALE Polaris lattice physics code to generate the homogenized, few-group constants. In this work, both pressurized water reactor and boiling water reactor (BWR) colorset models are used to verify the proposed approach. The accuracy presented in the colorset models verified the capability of the PARCS/Polaris procedures for the transition core analysis in light water reactors. For the whole-core calculation, the ATF and EE-ATF transition core models were incorporated, in addition to the nominal core model. The BWR model was chosen to represent the entire core calculation due to its challenging design. The core parameters studied are the core power distribution, power peaking factor, Doppler temperature coefficients, and control rod worth at cold zero power and hot full power. When the core parameters of the transition cores are compared with those of the nominal core in PARCS, the results suggest that there is no drastic change in the core parameters for the implementation of ATF and EE fuels.