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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.”
Gasper Zerovnik, Luka Snoj, Matjaz Ravnik
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 163 | Number 2 | October 2009 | Pages 183-190
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE163-183
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We demonstrated the use of combinatorial methods to optimize the filling of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) in metal canisters for final deep SNF repository, according to the maximal allowed thermal power per canister Pmax and the limit of n = 4 spent-fuel assemblies per canister. As a next step, the deposition time can be optimized by minimizing the required number of canisters M and the interim storage time. The method has been tested in detail for a typical pressurized water reactor (PWR), nuclear power plant (NPP) Krsko, SNF for different numbers of reactor cycles and different Pmax. The results show that the time interval between the last reactor cycle and the optimal deposition time varies between 3 and 30 yr for a typical PWR. The most significant contribution to the uncertainty of the calculated SNF decay heat (thermal power) is due to inaccurate cross sections taken from generic cross-section libraries. The quality of the results was verified by comparing the calculated M to the theoretical lower boundary Mmin. The idea behind the optimization method is universal and thus can be implemented for any SNF, canister, and repository design.
