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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.”
F. Schmittroth, R. E. Schenter
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 74 | Number 3 | June 1980 | Pages 168-177
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE80-A20116
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method of cross-section adjustment and evaluation is presented. Based on a finite element representation, the method is especially appropriate for cross sections that are well represented by continuous functions. It is also suitable for many problems outside the area of cross-section evaluation where one desires to fit curves that have complicated shapes not easily described by low-order polynomials. The algorithm is based on least-squares techniques that use complete covariance information and prior values. Nuclear model calculations, microscopic and integral data, and the results of prior multigroup adjustments can be combined in a single consistent evaluation. Results are presented for an illustrative example and for the evaluation of the 54Fe(n, p) dosimeter cross section.
