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ANS Student Conference 2025
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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.”
Vasiliy Arzhanov, Imre Pázsit, Ninos S. Garis
Nuclear Technology | Volume 131 | Number 2 | August 2000 | Pages 239-251
Technical Paper | Nuclear Plant Operations and Control | doi.org/10.13182/NT00-A3114
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It has been proposed that the fluctuations of the neutron current, called the current noise, can be used in addition to the scalar noise in reactor diagnostic problems. The possibility of the localization of a vibrating control rod pin in a pressurized water reactor control assembly is investigated by using the scalar neutron noise and the two-dimensional radial current noise as measured at one central point in the assembly. An explicit localization technique is elaborated in which the searched position is determined as the absolute minimum of a minimization function. The technique is investigated in numerical simulations. The results of the simulation tests show the potential applicability of the method.