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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.”
Pietro Mosca, Claude Mounier, Pierre Bellier, Igor Zmijarevic
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 175 | Number 3 | November 2013 | Pages 266-282
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE12-63
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper shows two ways to improve the accuracy of the transport calculations. These improvements, implemented in the APOLLO2 code, concern the fission source calculation and the self-shielding models. The calculation of the fission source was generalized to fission spectra including an incident neutron energy dependence. The subgroup self-shielding model was updated for a mixture of resonant nuclides. Some tests on fast neutron systems like a critical sphere without reflector, a sodium-cooled cell, and a helium-cooled cell show that the use of four optimized incident macro groups for fission spectra guarantees a correct representation of the fission source.The tests on a critical sphere with a thick steel reflector and on a water-moderated mixed oxide cell prove that the subgroup self-shielding, accounting for the mutual shielding of several resonant nuclides, allows us to improve the accuracy of the neutron transport solution.