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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.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
Nicolas P. Leclaire, Jacques A. Anno, Gérard Courtois, Pascal Dannus, Gilles Poullot, Veronique Rouyer
Nuclear Technology | Volume 144 | Number 3 | December 2003 | Pages 303-323
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT03-A3447
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Up to now, criticality safety experts used density laws fitted on experimental data and applied them outside the measurement range. Depending on the case, such an approach could be wrong for nitrate solutions. Seven components are concerned: UO2(NO3)2, U(NO3)4, Pu(NO3)4, Pu(NO3)3, Th(NO3)4, Am(NO3)3, and HNO3. To obviate this problem, a new methodology based on the thermodynamic concept of mixtures of binary electrolytes solutions (one electrolyte + water) at constant water activity, a so-called "isopiestic" solution, has been developed by the Institute de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) to calculate the nitrate solutions density. This paper presents its qualification by using criticality experiments. The theory and the implementation are also given.Qualification results of the uranyl and plutonium nitrate solutions show that the new density law (also called the isopiestic law) is in good agreement with the benchmarks. Thus, no bias is put into evidence for the uranium solutions, and a small negative bias equal to 0.2% is found for the plutonium solutions.Moreover, the isopiestic law corrects the observed 1% overestimation of keff due to the empirical IRSN Leroy and Jouan density law for uranium solutions and the observed 3.4% underestimation of keff due to the ARH-600 density law for plutonium solutions.The isopiestic density law has been implemented in CIGALES V2.0, the graphical user interface of the French criticality safety package CRISTAL that calculates the atom densities of nuclides (and writes the input file for CRISTAL computations).
