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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.”
Kenji Yokoyama (JAEA), Takanori Kitada (Osaka Univ)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 1221-1230
As a method to improve the design prediction accuracy by utilizing integral experimental data, the conventional cross-section adjustment method (CA) based on Bayes the- orem is widely used. On the other hand, propositions of the generalized bias factor method (GB) in 2006 and the extended bias factor method (EB) in 2007 have stimulated theoretical study in this field. Subsequently, several new cross-section adjustment methods were proposed: the ex- tended cross-section adjustment method (EA); the cross- section adjustment methods based on minimum variance unbiased estimation (MVUE), which include the MVUE- based rigorous EA (MREA) and the MVUE-based rigorous CA (MRCA); and the dimension-reduced cross-section ad- justment method (DRCA). In the present paper, we applied these methods to a real-scale problem of design prediction accuracy evaluation for a large-size sodium cooled fast re- actor and compared their performances. From these re- sults, we discuss a proper use of these design methods.