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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.”
W. L. Filippone, S. Woolf
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 100 | Number 3 | November 1988 | Pages 201-208
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE88-A29032
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An angular redistribution function for electron scattering based on Goudsmit-Saunderson theory has been implemented in a Monte Carlo electron transport code in the form of a scattering matrix that we term SMART (simulating many accumulative Rutherford trajectories). These matrices were originally developed for use with discrete ordinates electron transport codes. An essential characteristic of this scattering theory is a large effective mean-free-path for electrons, much larger in fact than the true single collision mean-free-path. When this theory is applied to single collision analog Monte Carlo calculations, excellent results are obtained for the principal quantities of interest, transmission and reflection spectra, and energy deposition. A derivation of the SMART scattering matrix is presented, using the method of weighted residuals to obtain the discretized form of the Spencer-Lewis equation for electron transport. Results of Monte Carlo calculations for electron transport in aluminum slabs for both beam source and isotropic source configurations are given. These results are compared with similar benchmark calculations made with the TIGER code series.
