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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.”
R. D. M. Garcia, C. E. Siewert, J. R. Thomas Jr.
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 186 | Number 2 | May 2017 | Pages 103-119
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2016.1273627
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The long-standing problem of implementing the PN method effectively for spherical geometry is revisited in this work. It is shown that a least-squares approach to the method resolves to a great extent the numerical instability reported for the first time by Aronson in 1984. In the proposed version of the method, a small loss of accuracy is still observed for intermediate orders of the approximation, but in high order (typically N ≥ 199), full accuracy is recovered, and the method can be used with confidence even for extremely high orders of the approximation. Numerical results of benchmark quality are tabulated for the quantities of interest for two basic transport problems in spherical geometry: the albedo problem for a sphere and the critical-sphere problem, both including cases that show the effects of scattering anisotropy described by the binomial law.