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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.”
Taro Ueki
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 7 | July 2019 | Pages 776-789
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1562779
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is known that the convergence of standardized time series (STS) to Brownian bridge yields standard deviation estimators of the sample mean of correlated Monte Carlo tallies. In this work, a difference scheme based on a stochastic differential equation is applied to STS in order to obtain a new functional statistic (NFS) that converges to Brownian motion (BM). As a result, statistical error estimation improves twofold. First, the application of orthonormal weighting to NFS yields a new set of asymptotically unbiased standard deviation estimators of sample mean. It is not necessary to store tallies once the updating of estimator computation is finished at each generation. Second, it becomes possible to assess the convergence of sample mean in an assumption-free manner by way of the comparison of power spectra of NFS and BM. The methodology is demonstrated for a challenging criticality problem based on Mennerdahl’s work, reactor tallies of representative correlation characteristics, and the delayed neutron fraction calculation of units of loosely coupled highly enriched uranium and 239Pu.