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Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
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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.”
Ryota Omori, Yasushi Sakakibara, Atsuyuki Suzuki
Nuclear Technology | Volume 118 | Number 1 | April 1997 | Pages 26-31
Technical Paper | Kiyose Birthday Anniversary Special / Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35353
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Applications of genetic algorithms (GAs) to optimization problems in the solvent extraction process for spent nuclear fuel are described. Genetic algorithms have been considered a promising tool for use in solving optimization problems in complicated and nonlinear systems because they require no derivatives of the objective function. In addition, they have the ability to treat a set of many possible solutions and consider multiple objectives simultaneously, so they can calculate many pareto optimal points on the trade-off curve between the competing objectives in a single iteration, which leads to small computing time. Genetic algorithms were applied to two optimization problems. First, process variables in the partitioning process were optimized using a weighted objective function. It was observed that the average fitness of a generation increased steadily as the generation proceeded and satisfactory solutions were obtained in all cases, which means that GAs are an appropriate method to obtain such an optimization. Secondly, GAs were applied to a multiobjective optimization problem in the co-decontamination process, and the trade-off curve between the loss of uranium and the solvent flow rate was successfully obtained. For both optimization problems, CPU time with the present method was estimated to be several tens of times smaller than with the random search method.