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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!
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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.”
Kadir Kavaklioglu, Belle R. Upadhyaya
Nuclear Technology | Volume 125 | Number 1 | January 1999 | Pages 70-84
Technical Paper | Reactor Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2933
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A methodology for designing membership functions for fuzzy controllers has been developed and demonstrated with application to feedwater heater level control. This method, namely simulated annealing, assumes that the rule base is determined by an expert who is knowledgeable about the process to be controlled. Although this method is applicable to any type of fuzzy controller, max-min center-average fuzzy controllers with triangular and trapezoidal membership functions were used due to the ease of implementation of this combination. This method essentially performs a random search for the parameters of the membership functions that yield the minimum squared error between the plant outputs and their setpoints for a given test signal as a disturbance. A major dimensionality reduction is accomplished through the identification of some requirements on membership functions. A significant improvement is made in handling membership function constraints that allows the use of every generated solution in the search process. The proposed methodology was applied to the control of cascade-arranged feedwater heaters that are currently controlled by individual pneumatic proportional-only controllers. An optimal fuzzy control system was developed for controlling the levels in this system for a typical load-following transient. The optimal fuzzy controller was found to improve rise time and settling time and to decrease the overshoot in the desired level.