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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
Muhammad Rizki Oktavian, Oscar Lastres, Yuxuan Liu, Yunlin Xu
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 196 | Number 6 | June 2022 | Pages 651-667
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2021.2017664
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Due to the low computational cost, nodal diffusion methods are still commonly used to simulate full-core reactor problems. This work represents the developmental effort to build an accurate nodal kernel to treat hexagonal geometry in the core simulator code PARCS. An innovative method called TriPEN-9 has been developed by splitting a hexagonal assembly into six triangular nodes and solved using cubic polynomial expansion for the scalar flux with nine-term expansion coefficients. The nodal diffusion calculation is further accelerated with the multilevel coarse-mesh finite difference method. The verification of the TriPEN-9 method on the VVER full-core problem is provided with the model based on the NURESIM (Nuclear Reactor Simulator)-SP1 V1000-2D-C1-tr benchmark problem. The Serpent Monte Carlo code is used as a reference solution for verification and to generate homogenized group-constants data for PARCS. Exact discontinuity factors were generated in GenPMAXS, a cross-section processing code, using a similar expansion method as the TriPEN-9 core solver method with the utilization of heterogeneous solutions from Serpent. Implementing the TriPEN-9 method in PARCS, this approach can exactly reproduce the solutions from the high-fidelity Serpent calculations.