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
Nuclear Criticality Safety
NCSD provides communication among nuclear criticality safety professionals through the development of standards, the evolution of training methods and materials, the presentation of technical data and procedures, and the creation of specialty publications. In these ways, the division furthers the exchange of technical information on nuclear criticality safety with the ultimate goal of promoting the safe handling of fissionable materials outside reactors.
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.”
Oliver S. Wang, Garill A. Coles, John E. Kelly, Thomas B. Powers, Thomas E. Rainey, Michael D. Zentner, Gregory D. Wyss, David M. Kunsman, LeAnn Adams Miller, Timothy A. Wheeler, Jeremy L. Sprung, Allen L. Camp
Nuclear Technology | Volume 96 | Number 2 | November 1991 | Pages 147-168
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT91-A34601
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In the late 1980s, a level III probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) was performed for the N Reactor, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) production reactor located on the Hanford site in Washington State. The PRA objectives were to assess the risks to the public and to the Hanford on-site workers posed by the operation of the N Reactor, to compare those risks to proposed DOE nuclear safety guidelines, and to identify risk-reduction changes to the plant. State-of-the-art methodology was employed based largely on the methods developed by Sandia National Laboratories for the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in support of the NUREG-1150 study of five commercial nuclear power plants. The structure of the probabilistic models allowed complex interactions and dependencies between systems to be explicitly considered. Latin hypercube sampling techniques were used to develop uncertainty distributions for the risks associated with postulated core damage events initiated by fire, seismic, and internal events as well as the overall combined risk. The risk results show that the N Reactor meets the proposed DOE nuclear safety guidelines and compares favorably to the commercial nuclear power plants considered in the NUREG-1150 analysis.