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NC State celebrates 70 years of nuclear engineering education
An early picture of the research reactor building on the North Carolina State University campus. The Department of Nuclear Engineering is celebrating the 70th anniversary of its nuclear engineering curriculum in 2020–2021. Photo: North Carolina State University
The Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University has spent the 2020–2021 academic year celebrating the 70th anniversary of its becoming the first U.S. university to establish a nuclear engineering curriculum. It started in 1950, when Clifford Beck, then of Oak Ridge, Tenn., obtained support from NC State’s dean of engineering, Harold Lampe, to build the nation’s first university nuclear reactor and, in conjunction, establish an educational curriculum dedicated to nuclear engineering.
The department, host to the 2021 ANS Virtual Student Conference, scheduled for April 8–10, now features 23 tenure/tenure-track faculty and three research faculty members. “What a journey for the first nuclear engineering curriculum in the nation,” said Kostadin Ivanov, professor and department head.
Sherly Ray, R. S. Modak
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 170 | Number 1 | January 2012 | Pages 75-86
Technical Note | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NSE10-87TN
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Numerical evaluation of the steady-state neutron flux distribution in a slightly subcritical nuclear reactor due to the presence of a fixed external source is considered by using neutron diffusion theory. It has been shown in the literature that in the particular case when keff is very close to unity (say, within 1 mk), many solution techniques face severe convergence problems. In this context, an acceleration method called Accelerated SubCritical Multiplication (ASCM), originally suggested in the well-known neutron transport code TORT, is investigated in this paper specifically for such cases. The studies are based on a realistic heavy water reactor test case analyzed by two-group diffusion theory. ASCM is found to work very well. It is useful even when the distributions of the external source and the fission source are vastly different. ASCM is based on iterative scaling of the overall flux level in the reactor. An alternative way to evaluate the “scaling factor” is discussed. A somewhat new ASCM-like scheme is suggested to accelerate the Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel iterations needed for the within-group calculations. Conditions for the effectiveness of this scheme are discussed. Implications of the present work in reactor kinetics and some other fields are indicated.