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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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.”
Hanlin Shu, Liangzhi Cao, Qingming He, Qi Zheng, Tao Dai
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 198 | Number 11 | November 2024 | Pages 2209-2229
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2023.2295065
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The unstructured mesh (UM)–based Monte Carlo (MC) method can utilize modern computer-aided-design/computer-aided-engineering platforms to obtain geometric models with reduced human effort and is capable of generating high-resolution tally data. This approach presents a significant advantage over the traditional Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG)–based MC method in handling complex geometries and conducting multiphysics calculations. In this study, the UM-based MC calculation capability was developed in the MC code NECP-MCX. On this basis, an automatic UM-based Consistent Adjoint-Driven Importance Sampling (CADIS) method was further studied and implemented in which the adjoint deterministic calculation, forward MC calculation, and variance reduction (VR) parameter generation were performed on the unified UM model. To achieve this, the discrete ordinates (SN)–Discontinuous Finite Element Method (DFEM) code NECP-SUN was embedded into NECP-MCX as the adjoint transport solver. Validations of the developed code and evaluations of the VR performance of the UM-based CADIS method were conducted on the Pool Critical Assembly (PCA) Replica benchmark and H. B. Robinson Unit 2 (HBR-2) benchmark. The numerical results indicated that the developed UM-based particle tracking capability achieved comparable accuracy to the CSG-based approach. Furthermore, compared to the traditional CADIS method, the UM-based CADIS method demonstrated higher figure-of-merit (FOM) values (3.5 to 44 times higher for the PCA Replica benchmark and 2.22 to 2.92 times higher for the HBR-2 benchmark), highlighting the superior VR performance of the UM-based CADIS method over the traditional CADIS method.