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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.”
William Boyd, Adam Nelson, Paul K. Romano, Samuel Shaner, Benoit Forget, Kord Smith
Nuclear Technology | Volume 205 | Number 7 | July 2019 | Pages 928-944
Regular Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2019.1571828
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
High-fidelity deterministic transport codes require highly accurate multigroup cross sections (MGXS). Monte Carlo is increasingly cited as a reactor-agnostic approach to MGXS generation since it is unconstrained by the engineering-based approximations that limit the applicability of deterministic MGXS generation tools. This paper introduces a new framework that uses the OpenMC Monte Carlo code to generate MGXS for use in multigroup transport codes. The openmc.mgxs module is built atop OpenMC’s Python application programming interface to process tally data output by the OpenMC executable. This paper validates the module to generate MGXS that enable the multigroup OpenMOC transport code to compute eigenvalues to within 50 pcm and fission rates to within 1% of reference solutions for two heterogeneous pressurized water reactor benchmarks.
