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ANS Student Conference 2025
April 3–5, 2025
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.”
Chenglin Zhu, Yuhang Yan, Shuo Li, Hui Yu (SPICRI)
Proceedings | 2018 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2018) | Charlotte, NC, April 8-11, 2018 | Pages 732-737
The cosLATC is a multi-group two-dimensional lattice code developed by SNPSDC, which is an essential part in the COSINE(Core and System Integrated Engine) code package. Resonance self-shielding calculation is a very important part in the reactor physics calculation. It provides effective cross section for the next transport calculation. Traditional two-region resonance calculation method based on equivalence theory was developed in the cosLATC code. However, for the fuel pin which contains strong resonance self-shielding effect or huge absorption cross section nuclides, the spatial variation of the self-shielding effect is crucial to determine its radial power distribution. The equivalence theory assumes a spatially constant cross section within the fuel region and cannot evaluate spatially dependent resonance self-shielding effect. So the SDDM (Spatially Dependent Dancoff Method) self-shielding resonance was developed in the latest version of cosLATC which can split the fuel pellet into arbitrary number of annuli and generate the effective cross section for every annulus. A serial of benchmarks are calculated to verify this new resonance self-shielding module were performed. These benchmarks include different assembly problems of Watts Bar benchmark and critical benchmarks. The results show that the new resonance self-shielding module is capable of modeling the resonance self-shielding in a variety of PWR benchmarking cases, including difficult fuel lattice cases with poison, control rods or mixed gadolinia fuel rods. The critical calculation results can be accepted for the lattices which the conditions vary with the enrichment, radius of fuel rods, lattices pitch and experimental buckling.