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ANS Student Conference 2025
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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.”
A. Goldfeld, A. Tsechanski, and G. Shani
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 90 | Number 3 | July 1985 | Pages 330-340
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE85-A17774
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Different concepts of integral experiments for fusion blanket neutronics are investigated. The first is with the neutron source (tritium target of a neutron generator) located inside of or in immediate proximity to the stack of blanket materials under consideration. The second is based on irradiation of the stack by means of a collimated and, therefore, monoenergetic T(d, n)4He neutron beam with a tritium target placed outside the stack. The comparison between the different concepts is carried out by means of the Monte Carlo transport code MCNP with continuous energy treatment. The comparison between the two approaches reveals that the integral experiments with a collimated monoenergetic T(d,n)4He neutron beam result in a neutron spectrum that is better correlated with the details of elastic and inelastic scattering to the first level of the material's nuclei than the one with a neutron source inside a stack. In the case of a collimated neutron beam, there is a clearer separation between energy regions of different neutron interactions and, therefore, the source of discrepancies between measurement and calculation can be identified more easily and corrected by a proper treatment of the cross sections of the specified nuclear reactions.
