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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.”
Woosong Kim, Kyunghoon Lee, Yonghee Kim
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 192 | Number 1 | October 2018 | Pages 1-20
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1497396
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Albedo-corrected Parameterized Equivalence Constants (APEC) method, a new leakage correction method for two-group nodal analysis of light water reactors, has been extended to discontinuity factor (DF) correction. First, the error of nodal calculations induced by an inaccurate assembly discontinuity factor (ADF) is evaluated using the reference two-group cross section (XS) and DF calculated from heterogeneous core transport calculations. Functionalization of DF is performed by finding relationships between surfacewise current-to-flux ratio and change of DF from ADF. The least-squares method is used to fit several candidate functions to various core calculation results. The coefficients of APEC XS and DF correction functions are determined considering several color-set models. In this work, the two-dimensional method of characteristics–based lattice code DeCART2D is used for reference core calculations and lattice calculations. The extended APEC method is implemented in an in-house NEM nodal code using the partial-current coarse mesh finite difference acceleration. A small modular reactor (SMR) initial core benchmark is analyzed to evaluate the performance of the extended APEC method. In addition, the extended APEC method is applied to several variants of the SMR core and large variants to assess its general applicability.