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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.”
Thomas E. Stephenson and Sol Pearlstein
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 32 | Number 3 | June 1968 | Pages 377-384
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE68-A20220
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Early work ascertained that the Mn total cross section could not be fit by the Breit-Wigner single-level formula. Later work showed that a satisfactory fit below 10 keV could be achieved by the use of R-matrix analysis. Here, recent resonance data and the Breit-Wigner multilevel formula are used to fit the experimental data from 0.01 eV to 50 keV. Two bound levels and several positive energy levels are introduced in order to produce very good agreement with the measured total cross section. The parametric representation of the 55Mn cross section yields calculated values of 13.4 and 15 b for the capture 2200 m/sec cross section and resonance integral, and 1.94, 1.71, and 556 b for the thermal-bound atom, coherent-scattering cross section, and scattering resonance integral, respectively, all values being in good agreement with experiment. Qualitative agreement is obtained with polarization data.
