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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.”
Nicholas F. Herring, Benjamin S. Collins, Thomas J. Downar, Aaron M. Graham
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 291-307
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2082231
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work presents a new formulation of the axial expansion transport method explicitly using Legendre polynomials for arbitrarily high-order expansions. This new formulation also features an alternative method of axial leakage calculation to allow for nonextruded flat source region meshes. This alternative axial leakage is introduced alongside a balance equation requirement to ensure that neutron balance is preserved in the coarse mesh for a given axial leakage formulation, which allows for effective coarse mesh finite difference acceleration. A matrix exponential table method is derived to allow for fast computations of arbitrarily high-order matrix exponentials for this work and precludes the need for further research into matrix exponential calculations for this method. Numerical results are presented that demonstrate the stability of the axial expansion method in systems with voidlike regions, showcase the speedup from matrix exponential tables, and investigate the axial convergence of the method in terms of both expansion order and mesh size.