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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.”
Erik Johansson
Nuclear Technology | Volume 68 | Number 2 | February 1985 | Pages 263-268
Technical Note | Fabrication of Components of the Creys-Malville Plant / Fission Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT85-A33559
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The recycling of plutonium in close-packed pressurized water reactor (PWR) lattices, leading to a higher conversion ratio than recycling in a normal lattice, has been studied by calculations. These calculations were performed with the multigroup cell and assembly transport theory code CASMO. This code, widely used for normal light water reactor (LWR) lattices, was tested for close-packed ones by calculations on experiments. The outcome of these tests was reasonably good for the parameters of greatest importance in close-packed plutonium-recycle lattices. Subsequently, the code was applied to an LWR system containing PWRs with such lattices. The emphasis in this application was on the net consumption of natural uranium and separative work. In an asymptotic (steady-state) situation for the close-packed lattice case, these amounts turned out to be ∼35% below the corresponding ones for plutonium recycling in a normal lattice.
