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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. P. Hennart, E. M. Malambu, E. H. Mund
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 124 | Number 1 | September 1996 | Pages 97-110
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A24227
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Several polynomial finite elements of nodal type are introduced that should lead to convergence of O(h1) in the L2 norm. Two of these methods are new and are expected to achieve the same orders of convergence with fewer parameters than the third method. They are applied to the one-group diffusion equation under different formulations, namely, several versions (with or without reduced and transverse integrations) of the primal and the mixed-hybrid formulations. Convergence rates are checked for a model problem with an analytical solution. Two of these methods exhibit superconvergence phenomena [O(h4) instead of O(h3)], a fact that can be explained heuristically. The most promising method, with only five parameters per cell, turns out to yield only O(h2) in its most algebraically efficient versions, while it has the potential of O(h3) convergence rates. Again, an explanation is given for this behavior and a fully O(h3) version is developed. Finally, these methods are applied to more realistic multigroup situations. In all cases, they are compared with results obtained from polynomial nodal methods in response matrix formalism. In the multigroup case, a well-known reference solution is also used.