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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.”
Michael E. Dunn, C. L. Bentley, † S. Goluoglu, Lane S. Paschal‡, L. M. Petrie, H. L. Dodds
Nuclear Technology | Volume 119 | Number 3 | September 1997 | Pages 306-313
Technical Paper | Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT97-A35406
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
KENO V.a is a multigroup Monte Carlo code that solves the Boltzmann transport equation and is used extensively in the nuclear criticality safety community to calculate the effective multiplication factor keff of systems containing fissile material. Because of the smaller amount of disk storage and CPU time required in calculations, multigroup approaches have been preferred over continuous energy (point) approaches in the past to solve the transport equation. With the advent of high-performance computers, storage and CPU limitations are less restrictive, thereby making continuous energy methods viable for transport calculations. Moreover, continuous energy methods avoid many of the assumptions and approximations inherent in multigroup methods. Because a continuous energy version of KENO V.a does not exist, the objective of the work is to develop a new version of KENO V.a that utilizes continuous energy cross sections. Currently, a point cross-section library, which is based on a raw continuous energy cross-section library such as ENDF/B- V is not available for implementation in KENO V.a; however, point cross-section libraries are available for MCNP, another widely used Monte Carlo transport code. Since MCNP cross sections are based on ENDF data and are readily available, a new version of KENO V.a named PKENO Va has been developed that performs the random walk using MCNP cross sections. To utilize point cross sections, extensive modifications have been made to KENO V.a. At this point in the research, testing of the code is underway. In particular, PKENO V.a, KENO V.a, and MCNP have been used to model nine critical experiments and one subcritical problem. The results obtained with PKENO V.a are in excellent agreement with MCNP, KENO V.a, and experiments.