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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.”
H. Tellier
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 79 | Number 4 | December 1981 | Pages 393-403
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE81-A21390
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Until now, there has been a discrepancy between the computed and the measured values of the 238U effective capture integral. The former has always been greater than the latter. For this reason, the reactor physicists have used an adjustment of the computed value. At the present time, the accuracy of the cross-section knowledge has increased, and the reactor computation codes are almost exact. Such an adjustment, therefore, is no longer justified. Recently, several new measurements of the resonance parameters were carried out and the use of a multilevel formalism was suggested to compute the 238U cross sections. This paper shows that the simultaneous use of recent parameters and the Reich-Moore formalism explain the discrepancy. For thermal neutron reactors, and depending on the neutron spectrum hardness, between one-half and two-thirds of this discrepancy is explained by the neutron data and the remainder by the multilevel formalism. This last effect is not negligible. We have done similar studies for 232Th, but in this latter case the multilevel effect was found to be much smaller than for the 238U and can be neglected in most applications.