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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.”
Bingbing Ji, Zhiping Chen, Jia Liu, Liangzhi Cao, Zhuojie Sui, Hongchun Wu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 12 | December 2021 | Pages 1247-1264
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.1923338
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of the complexity of the nuclear reactor system, traditional statistical sampling methods, such as random sampling and Latin hypercube sampling, often lead to unstable uncertainty quantification results of the reactor physics analysis. In order to make the analysis results robust, traditional sampling methods require a large number of samples, which brings a huge computation cost. For this reason, this paper proposes a new sampling scheme based on the moment matching method to generate efficient samples for the uncertainty quantification of reactor physics calculations. A linear programming model is established to minimize the deviations of the first- and second-order moments. The generated samples can better reflect the statistical characteristics of the real distribution than classical sampling methods. A series of numerical experiments is carried out to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed moment matching sampling method, which can quickly provide more reliable uncertainty quantification results with a small sample size.