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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.”
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Neutronic modeling of fusion machines requires a detailed representation of their complex geometry in order to properly evaluate various parameters of interest such as energy deposition and tritium production in the breeding blanket. In this work, the neutronics of the Affordable, Robust, Compact (ARC) fusion reactor is modeled with the Monte Carlo particle transport code Serpent developed at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland as an alternative to other, more established, tools in the fusion community such as the Monte Carlo N-Particle Transport (MCNP) code. The tritium breeding ratio (TBR) and the power deposited by neutrons and photons inside the breeding blanket of ARC are evaluated. Considerations related to activation of materials and to neutron shielding are not taken into account. As a first step, estimations have been obtained adopting a spatially uniform neutron source inside the plasma chamber. A second set of calculations has been performed considering a nonuniform source that takes into account a more realistic neutron generation distribution, with higher values at the center of the plasma and reduced rates toward the plasma edge. The results obtained with Serpent have been compared with available literature values for the TBR and the power deposition, confirming that Serpent can be considered a suitable alternative code for the neutronic analysis of fusion reactors like ARC. The TBR presented in this paper (1.0853) is in good agreement with the value found in the literature, with a relative difference of 0.49%. The total power deposition has a maximum relative difference of 12% for the components of interest in the present work.