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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.”
N. Nunomura, S. Sunada, K. Watanabe
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 60 | Number 3 | October 2011 | Pages 1155-1158
Blanket and Breeder Materials | Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tritium Science and Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST11-A12620
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Adsorption of H2O on the -Al2O3 (0001) surface was studied by means of a first-principles calculation based on density functional theory (DFT). We also investigated the behavior of the isotope exchange by substituting a protium atom with deuterium or tritium. The oxygen atom of H2O adsorbs on the Al atom of the outermost surface layer, the entire water molecule is slanted at the direction of a hollow site, and a molecular plane is nearly parallel to the surface. The adsorbed states are mostly due to coupling of lone-pair electrons of H2O with the empty p orbitals of the Al atom of surface. The behavior of dissociation for H2O is clarified from molecular dynamics simulations, indicating that the second neighbor oxygen atom is more preferable adsorption site for dissociation than the nearest neighbor oxygen atom on the surface.
