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ANS Student Conference 2025
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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.”
Tejbir Singh, Updesh Kaur, Shivali Tandon, Parjit S. Singh
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 165 | Number 2 | June 2010 | Pages 240-244
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE09-35TN
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Photon interaction (ZPIeff) and photon energy absorption (ZPEAeff) effective atomic numbers have been computed for some amino acids, namely, alanine (C3H7NO2), arginine (C6H14N4O2), aspartic acid (C4H7NO4), glycine (C2H5NO2), isoleucine (C6H13NO2), serine (C3H7NO3), and valine (C5H11NO2) in the energy range of 1 keV to 20 MeV. It has been observed that the effective atomic numbers (photon interaction and photon energy absorption) for the selected amino acid differ only in the lower-energy region (5 to 100 keV) and the maximum deviation is observed at ˜30 keV. Further, the maximum values of the effective atomic numbers for photon interaction and photon energy absorption were observed to be at different energies. For the photon interaction effective atomic number, the maximum for the selected amino acids appears at ˜5 keV, whereas the photon energy absorption effective atomic number has its maximum for the selected amino acids at ˜15 keV. Among the selected amino acids, aspartic acid shows the maximum effective atomic number, whereas the least effective atomic numbers were observed for isoleucine.
