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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.”
Y. S. Rana, S. B. Degweker
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 162 | Number 2 | June 2009 | Pages 117-133
Technical Papers | doi.org/10.13182/NSE08-13
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In our earlier papers, we developed a theory of reactor noise for accelerator-driven systems (ADSs). It was shown that reactor noise in ADSs is different from that in critical or radioactive source-driven subcritical systems because of the periodically pulsed source and its non-Poisson character. Various noise descriptors, such as Rossi alpha, Feynman alpha (or variance to mean), power spectral density, and cross-power spectral density, were derived, for a periodically pulsed source, including correlation between different pulses and finite pulses of different shapes. Throughout the work we restricted ourselves to the case of prompt neutrons only. In the present paper, we extend the theory to the delayed neutron case. Feynman-alpha and Rossi-alpha formulas are derived by considering the source to be a periodically pulsed non-Poisson source, without correlations between different pulses. Each pulse is assumed to be a delta function. The calculations are carried out in the time domain that leads to closed-form expressions for these descriptors.