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The mission of the Decommissioning and Environmental Sciences (DES) Division is to promote the development and use of those skills and technologies associated with the use of nuclear energy and the optimal management and stewardship of the environment, sustainable development, decommissioning, remediation, reutilization, and long-term surveillance and maintenance of nuclear-related installations, and sites. The target audience for this effort is the membership of the Division, the Society, and the public at large.
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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
Bret Patrick van den Akker (ORNL)
Proceedings | 16th International High-Level Radioactive Waste Management Conference (IHLRWM 2017) | Charlotte, NC, April 9-13, 2017 | Pages 615-621
We present the analytical solution to the one-dimensional radionuclide transport equation in Laplace transform space. Our model accommodates an arbitrary-length decay chain, an arbitrary combination of host rocks (i.e., an arbitrary combination of multiply fractured and porous transport segments), and a flexible source term (i.e., an arbitrary time-dependent release mode at the entrance point to the series of transport segments). The Laplace transformed analytical solution can be numerically inverted to obtain the time-dependent concentration of the radionuclides of interest at an arbitrary down gradient location. This represents an extension of the previously1 developed model to include the feature of hydrodynamic longitudinal dispersion. This additional feature is important because hydrodynamic dispersion is known to reduce the time of first arrival in radionuclide transport models. Increased fidelity in transport pathway calculations is important for reliable performance assessment for the geological disposal of spent nuclear fuels.