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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.”
J. E. Morel, T. A. Wareing, R. B. Lowrie, D. K. Parsons
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 144 | Number 1 | May 2003 | Pages 1-22
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE01-48
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We analyze three ray-effect mitigation techniques in two-dimensional x-y geometry. In particular, two angular finite element methods, and the modulated P1-equivalent S2 method, are analyzed. It is found that these techniques give varying levels of ray-effect mitigation on certain traditional test problems, but all of them yield discrete-ray solutions for a line source in a void. In general, it is shown that any transport angular discretization technique that results in a hyperbolic approximation for the directional gradient operator will yield a discrete-ray solution for a line source in a void. Since the directional gradient operator is in fact hyperbolic, it is not surprising that many discretizations of the operator retain this property. For instance, our results suggest that both continuous and discontinuous angular finite element methods produce hyperbolic approximations. Our main conclusion is that the effectiveness of any hyperbolic ray-effect mitigation technique will necessarily be highly problem dependent. In particular, such techniques must fail in problems that have the most severe ray effects, i.e., those that are "similar" to a line source in a void.