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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. N. Mathur, M. S. Murali, R. H. Iyer, A. Ramanujam, P. S. Dhami, V. Gopalakrishnan, M. K. Rao, L. P. Badheka, Asoke Banerji
Nuclear Technology | Volume 109 | Number 2 | February 1995 | Pages 216-225
Technical Paper | Enrichment and Reprocessing System | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35054
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An extraction chromatographic technique using octyl(phenyl)-N,N-diisobutylcarbamoylmethylphosphine oxide (CMPO) adsorbed on chromosorb-102 (CAC) has been tested as an alternative to the TRUEXsolvent extraction process, where CMPO has been used as the extracting agent to recover minor actinides from high-activity waste (HAW) solutions of PUREX origin. The batchwise uptake behavior of U(VI), Pu(IV), Am(III), Eu(III), Zr(IV), Fe(III), Ru(III), and from a nitric acid medium by CAC has been studied. The uptake of actinides and lanthanides are higher than those of other fission products and inert materials. The batchwise loading experiments in the presence of Nd(III)/U(VI) have shown that at lower concentrations of these metal ions, the uptake of Pu(IV), U(VI), and Am(III) are reasonably high. Studies on loading of Nd(III), U(VI), and Pu(IV) on a column containing 1.7 g of CAC have shown that Nd(III) (30 mg) and U(VI) (90 mg) could be loaded, while Pu(IV) (∼0.6 mg) was loaded on a small column containing 100 mg of CAC without any breakthrough. Further, a synthetic HAW solution as such and the actual PUREX HAW solution, after depleting the uranium content by a 30% tributyl-phosphate contact, were loaded on a CAC column. The effluents did not contain any alpha activity above the background level. The activities could subsequently be eluted with 0.04 M HNO3 (americium and rare earths), 0.01M oxalic acid (plutonium), and 0.25 M Na2CO3 [U(VI)]. The recoveries of these metal ions were found to be >99%.