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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.”
Tom Burr, Michael S. Hamada
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 177 | Number 3 | July 2014 | Pages 307-320
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE13-86
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The time series of material balances in nuclear material accounting (NMA) is also known as the material unaccounted for (MUF) sequence. This paper applies a joint cusum test to residual time series from NMA that arise from either of two options. The first residual series is the standardized, independently transformed MUF (SITMUF) sequence that relies on an estimate of Σ, the MUF covariance matrix. The second residual series arises from using either time series modeling or nonparametric smoothing on the MUF sequence and ignores the estimate of Σ. Assuming that the MUF sequence is multivariate Gaussian and ignoring estimation error in Σ, we find the anticipated result that the first option is superior to the second option. In addition, we find that the SITMUF scheme in the first option is robust to modest estimation error in Σ over a large number of idealized facilities, but not necessarily so for any specific idealized facility. These two findings provide a perspective on previous literature that addressed a perceived weakness in NMA.
