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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.”
Yong-Seok Choi, Dong-Hoon Kam, Byong-Guk Jeon, Jong-Kuk Park, Sang-Ki Moon
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 10 | October 2023 | Pages 2711-2722
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2132100
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Insufficient thermal-hydraulic knowledge for analysis of a reactivity-initiated accident demands experiments of fast-transient flow boiling heat transfer from moderate- to high-pressure conditions. In this study, those experiments are conducted for vertical upward tube flows of pressurized water. The tube wall is joule heated by stepwise electric pulse power to achieve an abrupt wall heating condition. The applied pulse power is varied from 4.68 to 13.59 GW/m3, which is beyond the power required for steady-state critical heat flux (CHF) to occur. Rapid evolution of the boiling wall temperature is extracted from outer wall temperature data by solving an inverse heat conduction problem. As a result, with increasing the applied pulse power, the time to occurrence of departure from nucleate boiling gets shorter, and the corresponding peak heat flux increases over the steady-state CHF, which is evaluated at the same flow condition. A logarithmic relation between the wall heating rate and the CHF increment ratio is also demonstrated. The effects of pressure, inlet subcooling, and mass flux on the transient peak heat flux are also investigated. As the pressure increases, the nucleate boiling duration gets shorter with decreasing peak heat flux. On the other hand, as the inlet subcooling increases, the nucleate boiling duration gets longer, and the peak heat flux increases. Contrarily, the mass flux does not show any noticeable effects on the transient heat transfer evolution.