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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.”
J. A. Grzesik
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 6 | June 2023 | Pages 1255-1263
Technical Note | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2138064
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We undertake to derive herein the Wigner-Wilkins (W-W) neutron/nucleus scattering kernel, a foundation stone in neutron thermalization theory, on the basis of a self-contained calculation in quantum mechanics. Indeed, a quantum-mechanical derivation of the W-W kernel is available in the literature, but it is, in our opinion, robbed of conviction by being couched in terms of an excessive generality. Here, by contrast, we proceed along a self-contained route relying on the Fermi pseudopotential and a first-order term in a time-dependent Born approximation series. Our calculations are fully explicit at every step, and, in particular, we tackle in its every detail a final integration whose result is merely stated in the available literature. Furthermore, and perhaps the most important point of all, we demonstrate that the quantum-mechanical W-W kernel outcome is identical down to the last iota with its classical antecedent, classical not only by virtue of historical precedence but also by being based on classical Newtonian mechanics.