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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.”
Tien-Ko Wang, Szu-Li Chang, Shi-Ping Teng
Nuclear Technology | Volume 83 | Number 1 | October 1988 | Pages 5-15
Technical Paper | Nuclear Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT88-A34170
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Using as a starting base the high-density spent-fuel storage racks to be put into the Chinshan and Kuo-shang nuclear power plants, a series of criticality analyses with various combinations of fuel assemblies and storage rack designs were performed using an AMPX-KENO/XSDRNPM computer code package. The calculated k∞ value for the storage pools in the two subject plants using Boral (0.013 g/cm2 10B) poisoned rack lattices and 3.2 wt% enriched fuel assemblies is 0.900 under conservative assumptions. Considering all the calculation biases and statistical and manufacturing uncertainties, the maximum k∞ value is estimated to be 0.929 under normal storage conditions. Variation in water temperature and density or abnormal positioning of fuel assemblies will result only in a negative effect on value. The deviation of the calculated k∞ values between the one-dimensional Sn XSDRNPM code and the KENO-IV code is within the normal Monte Carlo variations. Based on XSDRNPM calculations,K∞ values and the associated uncertainties due to fuel and rack manufacturing tolerances are tabulated. These interpolations can be used for the estimation of the value for any particular fuel and rack combination based on the tabulated data.