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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.”
Hatice Akkurt, Naeem M. Abdurrahman
Nuclear Technology | Volume 127 | Number 3 | September 1999 | Pages 301-314
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A3003
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In 1967, a series of critical experiments were conducted at the Westinghouse Reactor Evaluation Center under the joint sponsorship of the Empire State Atomic Development Associates (ESADA) and Westinghouse using mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel. During the experimental program, both single- and multiregion critical core configurations were constructed for different fuel types and lattice pitches. Two types of MOX fuels and a low-enriched UO2 fuel were used. A description of selected single-region ESADA experiments with criticality benchmark calculation results for those experiments as well as sensitivity analysis results on some configurations is given. Criticality calculations were performed using MCNP-4A with both ENDF/B-V and ENDF-B/VI cross-section libraries. The calculational results show that the calculated eigenvalues with ENDF/B-V cross-section libraries are higher than calculated eigenvalues with ENDF/B-VI cross-section libraries for all types of fuel. Calculational results also indicate that there is an increase in keff with increasing lattice pitch with both cross-section libraries. The uncertainties in keff value due to some uncertainties in the measured data are also calculated.