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ANS Student Conference 2025
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Albuquerque, NM|The University of New Mexico
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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.”
P. Cowan, G. Dobson, G. A. Wright, A. Cooper
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 780-784
MC Calculations | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9306
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
MCBEND is a well-established Monte Carlo code from The ANSWERS Software Service in the United Kingdom. It is being continually developed to meet the needs of its users. Recent developments to MCBEND are described here. These cover improvements to the underlying physics and data libraries, improvements in calculation efficiency, and improvements to the usability of the code.Recent developments include a Unified Tally option for scoring, including enhanced methods for scoring by material; extension of point energy adjoint calculations to include detailed thermal treatment; incorporation of a covariance library for detector cross sections; a number of new "hole" geometries in which Woodcock tracking takes place, including a tetrahedral mesh hole that imports a converted computer-aided design file; a new collision processor; and automatic meshing for acceleration of gamma-ray calculations.These developments have resulted in more flexibility in scoring, for example, the ability to score by material in regions incorporating Woodcock tracking; potentially more accurate adjoint calculations utilizing thermal detectors; automatic calculation of uncertainty due to detector cross sections; greater flexibility in geometry modeling; improved collision processing, for example, the ability to utilize bound data for thermal neutron transport in graphite; and less user input for efficient calculation acceleration.Some recent developments of MCBEND are described and examples of their use given.