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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.”
K. Tomlinson, D. G. Schroen
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 63 | Number 2 | March-April 2013 | Pages 288-295
Technical Paper | Selected papers from 20th Target Fabrication Meeting, May 20-24, 2012, Santa Fe, NM, Guest Editor: Robert C. Cook | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A16352
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Preshot characterization of the thickness and form of material samples in targets for dynamic materials properties experiments presents unique challenges. Because of design limitations, the measurement tools currently used introduce increasing error as samples deviate from perfect flatness or thickness uniformity. Contact measurements such as height gages and micrometers, for example, are insensitive to thickness variations occurring over spatial scales smaller than the contact probes. In addition, they measure thickness but not form and often damage samples. Standard confocal microscopes overcome some of these problems but can only measure form on the side of the sample that they see. Also, by design, they consistently overestimate thickness because form errors on the side of the sample against the reference surface always prevent perfect contact with it. We are developing a technique that may prove to be superior to both of these methods at characterizing both thickness and form of samples with both imperfect flatness and nonuniform thickness using only an interferometric optical profiler, an inexpensive fixture, a gage block, and a commercial three-dimensional modeling software. The end result is a computer model of the actual sample.