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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.”
Rogelio Castillo, Gustavo Alonso, Javier C. Palacios
Nuclear Technology | Volume 145 | Number 2 | February 2004 | Pages 139-149
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT04-A3465
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A method for nonlinear analysis of instabilities in boiling water reactors (BWRs) is presented. Both the Dominant Lyapunov Exponent method and the Slope of the Correlation Integral (SOCI) method are used to analyze the average power reactor monitor (APRM) signals from a BWR. The main advantage of using the two methods in a complementary manner is that doing so results in an enhancement of the capability to analyze noisy systems, such as the APRM signals in a BWR. Previously, such nonlinear analysis had been performed using independently either the Dominant Lyapunov Exponent Method or the SOCI method. These two methods are sensitive to noise in a signal and normally require large amounts of data for a reliable analysis.This proposed system for nonlinear analysis is composed first of a home-developed computer program called "SLOPE," which is based on the SOCI method. Then, the signal analysis is also performed by the "LENNS" code, which is used to obtain the dominant Lyapunov exponent. Since only the dominant Lyapunov exponent is computed, there is no need to acquire large amounts of data; thus, computational processing time is greatly reduced, even in the case of noisy data.The system was used to analyze BWR signals containing stationary and nonstationary limit cycles. It was found that this method satisfactorily calculates the limit cycles, extracting useful information from noisy signals.