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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.”
T. Dash, B. B. Nayak, M. Abhangi, R. Makwana, S. Vala, S. Jakhar, C. V. S. Rao, T. K. Basu
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 65 | Number 2 | March-April 2014 | Pages 241-247
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-663
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Because of their desirable structural properties, WC, WC+B4C, and WC + TiC are possible materials for use in plasma-facing components of fusion reactors like tokamaks. In this work, seven different compositions of WC-W2C composites have been prepared (30 to 50 at. % C) by an arc plasma melting technique followed by furnace cooling. Efforts have been made to produce a composite that is very hard and tough and that has a high neutron absorbing capacity by adding B4C and TiC (5 to 15 wt% each) to the starting WC powder. Microstructures of the composites were studied by field emission scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Multiphasic structures of the composites exhibited an absence of pores. The WC + TiC and WC + B4C composites showed improvements in microhardness over pure WC. Typical samples of WC-W2C, WC + B4C, and WC + TiC have been characterized by X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller techniques for analysis and correlation of material properties. When irradiated with 14-MeV D-T neutrons, it was observed that the pure WC melt-cast product exhibited a linear neutron absorption coefficient of 0.172 cm−1. The absorption coefficient was found to be a maximum (0.255 cm−1) for 5 wt% B4C added to WC as against Type 316LN stainless steel, which showed a value of 0.078 cm−1.