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Division Spotlight
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.”
Takumi Uezono, Toru Motoya, Katsunobu Natori, Satoshi Nishikawa, Keisuke Yamamoto, Tomokazu Takahashi, Shohei Nakamura, Goro Suzuki (Hitachi)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 645-652
We propose a design and verification process for a hardware-resource-efficient FPGA-based functional safety controller. In order to reduce the hardware resources consumed by the NPP application, we developed a resource-sharing calculation architecture on the FPGA. Our designed FPGA-based controller utilizing our developed architecture is hard-wired, but can operate another function by replacing contents in the calculation control memory. Thus, our developed controller achieves both safety and flexibility. In addition, a data conversion tool from NPP application to calculation control data for our developed architecture is also developed. In the verification step, output data from our developed tool is verified by a process where that calculation control data is reversely-converted to the NPP application and checked whether it is equivalent with the original NPP application by the logical equivalence verification method. Our verification process makes it possible to apply formal verification method and achieve the SIL 4 compliant verification process for the FPGA-based controller for Class 1 I&C systems . Our proposed design and verification process was assessed by TÜV Rheinland and accepted as SIL 4 compliant.