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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.
Michael E. Rising, Todd S. Palmer
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 160 | Number 3 | November 2008 | Pages 284-301
Technical Paper | dx.doi.org/10.13182/NSE160-284
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Characteristic methods are widely known to be very accurate approaches to the solution of numerical transport problems. These methods are most often used for neutron transport applications (i.e., lattice physics calculations) where spatial cells are of intermediate optical thickness [O(1) to O(100) mean free paths, depending on the energy group] and materials are not exceptionally highly scattering (scattering ratios < 0.999). There has been interest in using characteristic methods for radiative transfer applications, which often involve very optically thick and diffusive regions. Previous work has involved analyses of families of Cartesian geometry characteristic methods in optically thick and diffusive regions. There is a significant body of work in the Russian literature on curvilinear geometry characteristic methods, but very few analyses of their behavior in thick diffusive regions have been published. In this paper we develop two new members of a family of one-dimensional spherical geometry characteristic methods - the method of tubes. These new methods are similar to traditional slab geometry characteristics methods in that they utilize spatial moments of the transport equation in each cell to generate the data used in the representation of the total source (scattering source plus external source). We present the results of an asymptotic analysis of these methods to predict their behavior in the thick diffusion limit, and we compare these predictions with numerical results from several test problems. This analysis shows that the constant source (step) method behaves very poorly in the diffusion limit, but that the linear source method is accurate in this physical regime.