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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 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.”
Paul Wilson, Phiphat Phruksarojanakun
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 152 | Number 3 | March 2006 | Pages 243-255
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE06-A2579
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A new Monte Carlo (MC) method for calculating the isotopic inventory of material subjected to a neutron flux is developed and demonstrated. The method is particularly suited to modeling materials that flow through a system in a nondeterministic path. The method has strong analogies to MC neutral particle transport. The analog methodology is fully developed, including considerations for simple, complex, and loop flows, and enabling concepts such as sources and tallies. A wide variety of test problems is employed to demonstrate the validity of the analog method under various flow conditions. The method reproduced the results of the as-low-as-reasonably-achievable deterministic inventory code for comparable problems and is self-consistent when comparing complex flow scenarios to mathematically identical simple flow scenarios. A demonstration of highly scalable parallelization does not eliminate the need to develop variance reduction techniques.