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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.”
Masafumi Itagaki, Yoshinori Miyoshi, Hideyuki Hirose
Nuclear Technology | Volume 103 | Number 3 | September 1993 | Pages 392-402
Technical Paper | Nuclear Criticality Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34859
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A procedure is presented for the determination of geometric buckling for regular polygons. A new computation technique, the multiple reciprocity boundary element method (MRBEM), has been applied to solve the one-group neutron diffusion equation. The main difficulty in applying the ordinary boundary element method (BEM) to neutron diffusion problems has been the need to compute a domain integral, resulting from the fission source. The MRBEM has been developed for transforming this type of domain integral into an equivalent boundary integral. The basic idea of the MRBEM is to apply repeatedly the reciprocity theorem (Green’s second formula) using a sequence of higher order fundamental solutions. The MRBEM requires discretization of the boundary only rather than of the domain. This advantage is useful for extensive survey analyses of buckling for complex geometries. The results of survey analyses have indicated that the general form of geometric buckling is = (aN/Rc)2, where Rc represents the radius of the circumscribed circle of the regular polygon under consideration. The geometric constant aN depends on the type of regular polygon and takes the value of π for a square and 2.405 for a circle, an extreme case that has an infinite number of sides. Values of aN for a triangle, pentagon, hexagon, and octagon have been calculated as 4.190, 2.821, 2.675, and 2.547, respectively. Although the discussion is restricted to simple regular polygons, the proposed solution technique based on the MRBEM can easily be applied to many other complex geometries.