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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.
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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.”
Michael Thompson (Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville), Benjamin Jordan (Centrus Energy), Jamie Coble (Univ of Tennessee, Knoxville)
Proceedings | Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technolgies (NPIC&HMIT 2019) | Orlando, FL, February 9-14, 2019 | Pages 1267-1274
Greater situational awareness of plant conditions is necessary to move the current fleet of nuclear power facilities away from costly periodic maintenance activities. Sensed data provide the indicators of plant and equipment condition; however, these instrumentation and transmitters are themselves subject to aging and degradation over time. Online monitoring methods have long been proposed to assess the calibration status of sensors based on the data collected during normal plant operation. Auto-associative kernel regression models (AAKR) are commonly applied to predict the “expected” sensor value, and statistical hypothesis tests or thresholding algorithms are used to determine if the measured value agrees with the expectation. AAKR models work well for stationary operation of systems, but these models may not be as well suited for systems that undergo normal operational transients, as we expect to see in small modular reactors, advanced reactors, and many fuel cycle facilities. This paper presents an alternative approach to detection and diagnostics of sensor degradation and anomalies based on generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD) in computational linear algebra. The proposed method is demonstrated on experimental data collected on a two loop forced-flow water loop, but the approach is expected to be more generally applicable to a variety of nuclear facilities and to equipment and components beyond sensor suites.