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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.”
William P. Kelleher, J. Wiley Davidson, Gary R. Thayer, Donald J. Dudziak
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 17 | Number 3 | May 1990 | Pages 466-475
Technical Note | Shielding | doi.org/10.13182/FST90-A29221
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A radiation shielding analysis was performed on the Confinement Physics Research Facility (CPRF) under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory. A reversed-field pinch device, the ZTH, was examined in an effort to obtain an estimate of the spatial distribution of the dose seen by both personnel and electronic components. In the Monte Carlo transport analysis, the MCNP code was used to estimate the neutron and gamma-ray doses and differential flux (in energy) spectra at ten locations within the CPRF. The complex geometry of the ZTH dictated that the problem be solved in a two-step process: First, a cylindrical surface source enclosing the ZTH was computed, and then this source was used as the radiation source for the CPRF building calculations. Using a source strength of 1015 neutrons, identical calculations were performed for both deuterium-deuterium and deuterium-tritium fusion plasmas.
