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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.”
D. B. MacMillan, M. L. Storm
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 16 | Number 4 | August 1963 | Pages 369-380
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE63-A26547
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The applicability of the zero-neutron-lifetime approximation in describing the effects of neutron-level fluctuations is investigated for reactivities near and above prompt critical. It is concluded that meaningful statistical information can be obtained by the zero-lifetime model above prompt critical, and an approximate procedure for joining this model to a deterministic finite-lifetime model is suggested. Illustrative examples, comparing numerical results obtained by this approximation with more accurate finite-lifetime statistical calculations, are presented. In addition, application is made to Los Alamos and Livermore superprompt-critical burst experiments which fall outside of the practical computing range of the finite-lifetime model described in Part II. It is found that the agreement of calculation and experiment is as good as was found previously for a set of subprompt-critical burst experiments.
