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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.”
Ramiro Pareja, Nieves De Diego, Rosa Maria De La Cruz, Javier Del Río
Nuclear Technology | Volume 104 | Number 1 | October 1993 | Pages 52-63
Technical Paper | Material | doi.org/10.13182/NT93-A34869
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Positron lifetime and microhardness measurements have been performed on untreated, thermal-aged, neutron-irradiated, and postirradiation-annealed samples of reactor pressure vessel steels with the purpose of investigating the mechanisms of irradiation-induced hardening and recovery of the mechanical properties in these materials. The positron lifetime experiments have not revealed any evidence of the formation of a significant concentration of voids or vacancy clusters in samples irradiated at ∼290°C with fluences ≤2.71 × 1023 n/m2 (E > 1 MeV), but they suggest a dislocation annealing induced by the irradiation. Isochronal annealing experiments with neutron-irradiated samples show a simultaneous recovery in their positron lifetime and microhardness at ∼340°C. From the microhardness measurements, the yield strength of the irradiated material has been estimated. The results appear to be consistent with a model of hardening due to irradiation-induced dissolution of precipitates with formation of small metastable precipitates after postirradiation aging and recovery induced by the disappearance of these metastable precipitates.
