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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.”
A. Q. L. Nguyen, S. A. Eddinger, H. Huang, M. A. Johnson, Y. T. Lee, R. C. Montesanti, K. A. Moreno, M. E. Schoff
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 55 | Number 4 | May 2009 | Pages 399-404
Technical Paper | Eighteenth Target Fabrication Specialists' Meeting | doi.org/10.13182/FST09-18
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Capsules for the National Ignition Facility require measurement of isolated defects on the capsule surface. A phase-shifting diffraction interferometer (PSDI) is used to identify, locate, and measure defects by capturing 71 overlapping ~500-m-diam charge coupled device height maps for software analysis. Using capsules with drilled holes for the purpose of alignment, PSDI data were confirmed with atomic force microscopy by comparing defect data from corresponding equatorial bands. We explored the limitations of the PSDI resulting from unwrapping errors caused by defect slopes greater than the Nyquist sampling theorem. White light interferometry proved to be a useful complementary tool to measure defects that could not be unwrapped by the analysis software. Implementing the PSDI in conjunction with the shell flipper, both developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, allowed for full mapping of shell surfaces by mounting corresponding hemispheres onto the PSDI within a 2-deg accuracy.