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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.”
David Bernat, Richard B. Stephens
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 31 | Number 4 | July 1997 | Pages 473-476
Technical Paper | Eleventh Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A30804
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A long-standing problem in the characterization of multi-layered ICF capsules is the determination of the position of surfaces and interfaces from x-radiographic images. The accepted procedure for analyzing such images is to calculate the radial second derivative of x-ray absorption through a shell to locate the points of inflection in the absorption vs. radius plot which denote the layer interfaces. The computer routine developed in 1994 as an addition to NIH Image to perform this analysis was subject to unnecessary noise caused by calculating the radial finite second derivative (Δ2z/Δr2) from the interpolated radial points. Our most recent algorithm update solves this problem by directly determining the radial infinitesimal second derivative (d2z/dr2) of a cubic interpolation of surrounding pixels. This new procedure allows us to make reliable measurements of wall thickness vs. angle and layer uniformity, an improvement over the original method which only yielded layer thickness values averaged over all 360° of the shell.
