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
Mathematics & Computation
Division members promote the advancement of mathematical and computational methods for solving problems arising in all disciplines encompassed by the Society. They place particular emphasis on numerical techniques for efficient computer applications to aid in the dissemination, integration, and proper use of computer codes, including preparation of computational benchmark and development of standards for computing practices, and to encourage the development on new computer codes and broaden their use.
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.”
Kwang-Il Ahn, Young-Ho Jin
Nuclear Technology | Volume 116 | Number 2 | November 1996 | Pages 146-159
Technical Paper | Nuclear Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35296
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a probabilistic safety assessment for nuclear power plants, an important issue is the treatment and quantification of the uncertainties involved in each step of the system safety or accident analysis. There are two main types of uncertainties that should be explicitly considered in the analysis, i.e., parameter uncertainties contained in the model describing the behavior of real systems or accidents, and modeling uncertainties due to the imperfect description of the model itself. The latter case indicates a representation of imprecision in the analyst’s knowledge about models or their predictions. Although the field of uncertainty analysis has progressed to the point that several studies have been carried out that maintain a distinction between parameter and model uncertainty, in recent times, the model uncertainty analysis has indeed been less complete than that of the former type. However, there are important advantages to explicit consideration of the modeling uncertainty in risk analysis. The most important advantage is that it mitigates the overconfidence that can occur when a single model is used to make predictions since uncertainty bounds tend to be more realistic when a range of plausible models is considered. The second advantage is that it facilitates scientific communication because scientifically defensible analyses that explicitly incorporate a range of models obviate the problem of arguing over whose model is correct. The third advantage is the enhancement of credibility in the predictions or final outcomes. For these reasons, the modeling uncertainty should be incorporated into the current context of uncertainty analysis. A formal approach on the expression of highly uncertain models and its assessment within a probabilistic framework are provided. The basic idea of the current procedure is that the quantification of modeling uncertainties can be made by combining all the uncertainties assigned to alternative models into a probability distribution (or a family of probability distributions) about a particular result of interest, conditional on all the modeling assumptions that have been made in the analysis.