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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.”
S. M. Bowman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 174 | Number 2 | May 2011 | Pages 126-148
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the SCALE Nuclear Analysis Code System / Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-163
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Version 6 of the Standardized Computer Analyses for Licensing Evaluation (SCALE) computer software system developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, released in February 2009, contains significant new capabilities and data for nuclear safety analysis and marks an important update for this software package, which is used worldwide. This paper highlights the capabilities of the SCALE system, including continuous-energy flux calculations for processing multigroup problem-dependent cross sections, ENDF/B-VII continuous-energy and multigroup nuclear cross-section data, continuous-energy Monte Carlo criticality safety calculations, Monte Carlo radiation shielding analyses with automated three-dimensional variance reduction techniques, one- and three-dimensional sensitivity and uncertainty analyses for criticality safety evaluations, two- and three-dimensional lattice physics depletion analyses, fast and accurate source terms and decay heat calculations, automated burnup credit analyses with loading curve search, and integrated three-dimensional criticality accident alarm system analyses using coupled Monte Carlo criticality and shielding calculations.