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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.”
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Realistic probabilistic safety assessment and risk studies for nuclear power facilities and for emergency planning call for detailed knowledge of the shielding properties of buildings. The investigations described here focus on the building types encountered in central Europe, with its high population density. The necessary dose rate calculations are performed with a new combination of the point kernel integration technique (the QAD-CG-E code) and the S_n transport method (the DOT 4.2 code). This procedure seems to be optimal for irregular three-dimensional shielding structures, providing good accuracy and performing a great number of individual calculations. The validity and accuracy of the procedure are checked by Monte Carlo calculations (the SAM-CE code) and by recalculating a U.S. shielding experiment. The evaluation of literature and the examination of data led to a list of 12 building types representative of those in central Europe. The geometries of the buildings are composed of ∼150 to 300 basic geometrical bodies. This is the input for the QAD-CG-E computer code (i.e., combinatorial geometry). Shielding calculations are performed for these 12 building types assuming contamination by ¹³⁷Cs. The high-rise apartment and row house building types show a good shielding efficiency (a shielding factor <0.1), while the bungalow and prefabricated house offer the lowest shielding value (a shielding factor of 0.3). The other building types have a mean shielding factor value of 0.1. Additional calculations with ¹³¹I and ¹⁴⁰La show the influence of the gamma energy on the shielding factor. Moreover, gamma fields or spatial dose rate distributions are calculated for a semidetached house, a prefabricated house, and a high rise. The results are presented by isodose lines drawn through vertical and horizontal cross sections of the buildings.