ANS is committed to advancing, fostering, and promoting the development and application of nuclear sciences and technologies to benefit society.
Explore the many uses for nuclear science and its impact on energy, the environment, healthcare, food, and more.
Division Spotlight
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!
Latest Magazine Issues
Apr 2025
Jan 2025
Latest Journal Issues
Nuclear Science and Engineering
May 2025
Nuclear Technology
April 2025
Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
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.”
Edward Goodell, Glenn Sjoden, Reid Porter, Luther McDonald IV, Kari Sentz
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2069-2079
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2287802
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear forensics relies on different signatures to identify the source of nuclear material. Such signatures include crystalline structure, chemical composition, and particle morphology. One way to quantify morphology in electron microscope imagery is through image segmentation, where pixels are assigned to several partitions (or groups) that correspond to particles, grains, and other objects of interest within the image. Once pixels are assigned to segments, it is relatively straightforward to quantify other quantities of interest, such as grain size, circularity, etc. However, the range and diversity of microscope images make it difficult to obtain an accurate segmentation automatically. The accuracy of segmentation can be improved through supervised learning, but this requires many images to be manually segmented. Another way to improve the accuracy is to use interactive segmentation. Interactive segmentation requires a human to provide image-specific user input to improve performance. However, the amount of user input (effort) is generally far less than is required for supervised learning. In this paper, we investigate several parallelization strategies to automatically explore the user input parameter space of interactive segmentation algorithms across a large number of images. Specifically, we investigate four different parallelization mechanisms in a high-performance computing (HPC) environment and use the Amdahl fraction to evaluate efficiency on multiple processor cores across multiple nodes. Ultimately, the parallelization strategy that was most efficient utilized the message passing interface integrated with the segmentation and quantification code. This strategy had an Amdahl fraction of 0.985 and a performance of about 0.251 s/image. These results indicate that the parameter space of interactive segmentation algorithms can be efficiently explored using HPC. This opens the door to future work where user input is reduced and where interactive image segmentation algorithms are automatically applied to large image sets.