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The division was organized to promote the advancement of knowledge of the use of particle accelerator technologies for nuclear and other applications. It focuses on production of neutrons and other particles, utilization of these particles for scientific or industrial purposes, such as the production or destruction of radionuclides significant to energy, medicine, defense or other endeavors, as well as imaging and diagnostics.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
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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.”
Luciano Burgazzi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 173 | Number 2 | February 2011 | Pages 153-161
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A11544
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper describes a modeling and analysis approach for reliability prediction based on degradation modeling, considering multiple degradation measures and with respect to the thermal-hydraulic passive systems.Previous research on the topic has drawn attention to the susceptibility of passive systems to several modes of failure. In fact, it has been recognized that a system may have, in addition to component mechanism failures, multiple degradation paths, so it is necessary to simultaneously consider multiple degradation measures. Also, many research efforts on degradation analysis were initiated by making assumptions about the degradation mechanism. In reality, often there is very limited understanding about the concerned degradation mechanisms together with their interdependencies.In this paper, an analysis procedure is developed to address this aspect. Simulated data have been used to illustrate the applicability of this approach. Results on the application of the methods to a simplified model of the passive residual heat transport system in water-cooled reactors is presented. It was verified that when the multiple degradation measures in a system are correlated, an incorrect independence assumption may overestimate the system reliability.