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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.”
A. G. Buchan, C. C. Pain, M. D. Eaton, A. J. H. Goddard, R. P. Smedley-Stevenson
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 159 | Number 2 | June 2008 | Pages 127-152
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE159-127
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents two new methods for discretizing the angular dimension of the Boltzmann transport equation that describes the transport of neutral particles such as neutrons and photons. Our methods represent the direction of particle travel using linear and quadratic varying approximations over a quadrilateral partitioning of the unit sphere's surface (which is used to represent a particle's direction), which is similar to the approximations provided by a finite element expansion. However, our approximations are generated using a second generation spherical wavelet technique. This method generates hierarchical sets of compactly supported basis functions that are important properties for our future work in applying adaptive resolution in the transport equation's angular dimension. These new wavelet methods are applied to five monoenergetic transport problems to demonstrate their capabilities to efficiently represent the angular flux. Particular emphasis is placed on their ability to approximate particle transport in problems involving extreme material cross sections, namely, particle streaming through voids and their transport through highly scattering media. We are able to show that the methods work well against the common methods SN and PN when used within established radiation transport codes.