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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.”
Harshavardhan Kadvekar, Sana Khan, Sangeetha Prasanna Ram, Jayalekshmi Nair, S. Ganesan
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 183 | Number 3 | July 2016 | Pages 356-370
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE15-103
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In a majority of the cases, error propagation studies in nuclear science and engineering use the sandwich formula, which is strictly applicable when the probability density function of the random input quantities (e.g., the basic cross-section data) are determined completely by the mean and covariances. The use of the sandwich formula, which is also referred to in the literature as traditional first-order sensitivity analysis or adjoint-based sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, requires the assumption of linearity assumption and relatively small errors. For the first time, this paper examines the application of unscented transformation (UT) technique, which is used in control and reliability engineering, to error propagation in the nuclear field for nonlinear cases. Using different examples, this paper shows that this deterministic method of UT produces better results compared to the conventional sandwich formula for error propagation. An example on error propagation given in the literature is revisited, and a calculation of the efficiency of a gamma-ray detector is also presented for illustrative purposes using the UT method.
