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
Radiation Protection & Shielding
The Radiation Protection and Shielding Division is developing and promoting radiation protection and shielding aspects of nuclear science and technology — including interaction of nuclear radiation with materials and biological systems, instruments and techniques for the measurement of nuclear radiation fields, and radiation shield design and evaluation.
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.”
Mingfu He, Youho Lee (Univ of New Mexico)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 449-459
The critical heat flux (CHF) sets the upper limit of efficient heat removal for pool boiling. Microstructures fabricated on a heat transfer substrate can effectively increase the limit of heat removal and delay the boiling crisis. The exact physics mechanisms behind microstructure enhancement still remain ambiguous and CHF prediction on microstructured surfaces is not well resolved even if numerous related studies and experiments have been performed. In this study, the deep belief network (DBN) is proposed to predict CHF and study parametric trends of CHF by collecting relevant CHF datasets from published papers. Performance comparisons with other four common machine learning techniques and three modified Zuber models accounting for the effects of microstructures are conducted for exploring complicated and nonlinear relation between CHF and microstructures. Different from the training process of other regression modelling problems, a special model convergence, which is defined in Subsection 3.1, is required to be incorporated into the CHF model of DBN for exhibiting accurate parametric trends of CHF and improving the prediction accuracy. Numerical results demonstrate that DBN can achieve the best performance of CHF prediction in terms of prediction accuracy. The presented methodology provides new insights for CHF modelling in pool boiling enhanced by microstructures.