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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.”
M. B. Chadwick, L. J. Cox, P. G. Young, A.S. Meigooni
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 123 | Number 1 | May 1996 | Pages 17-37
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE96-A24210
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We present an evaluation of the interaction of neutrons with energies between 20 and 100 MeV with carbon nuclei. Our aim is to accurately represent integrated cross sections, inclusive emission spectra, and kerma factors, in a data library for use in radiation transport simulations offast neutron radiotherapy. We apply the Feshbach-Kerman-Koonin-GNASH nuclear model code, which includes Hauser-Feshbach, pre-equilibrium, and direct reaction mechanisms, and use experimental measurements to optimize the calculations. We determine total, elastic, and nonelastic cross sections; angle-energy-correlated emission spectra for light ejectiles with A ≤ 4 and gamma rays; and average energy depositions. Coupled-channel optical model calculations describe the total, elastic, and nonelastic cross sections well. Our results for charged-particle emission spectra agree fairly well with University of California-Davis as well as new Los Alamos National Laboratory and Louvain-la-Neuve measurements. We compare our results with the recent ENDF/B-VI evaluation and argue that some of the exclusive channels between 20 and 32 MeV should be modified. We also compare kerma factors derived from our evaluated cross sections with the measurements, providing an integral benchmark for our work. The evaluated data libraries are available as electronic files.
