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Division Spotlight
Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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.”
Arief Rahman Hakim, Douglas A. Fynan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 10 | October 2024 | Pages 2013-2037
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2280346
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Flux flattening and power uprating of large heavy water power reactors (HWRs) are demonstrated as an application of an accelerator-driven photoneutron source (ADS) in the ADS-CANDU concept where an array of electron linear accelerators is configured around the periphery of a subcritical CANDU-6 core. The localized ADS generated through (e−,γ,n) reactions in the HWR lattice perturbs the reactor power distribution by increasing the power of low-power bundles and depressing the power at the core center relative to the fundamental mode power distribution. Gross power uprating is feasible when the system is near critical, but the ADS array consumes tens of megawatts electric exceeding the power gained by a factor of more than 2 for the conservative ADS performance specifications assumed in the analysis. Several important challenges of fixed-source Monte Carlo simulations of near-critical multiplying media are investigated including severe load imbalance issues with distributed-memory parallel computing architecture and correlated local tallies in nonanalog (implicit absorption) Monte Carlo radiation transport. All subcritical fixed-source simulations in the study readily exceed the default random number stride used in most production Monte Carlo codes, and the stride exceedance causes both bias in local tally results (bundle powers) and spatial autocorrelation of these errors/biases in the large core. A legacy stride exceedance is critically reviewed, and the conclusions and subsequent interpretations of those conclusions are rejected. Several classes of radiation transport Monte Carlo problems are likely to be susceptible to stride exceedance, and this issue needs to be promptly addressed by the Monte Carlo analyst and code developer communities.