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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.”
L. K. Mansur, Y. M. Charara, S. B. Guetersloh, I. Remec, L. W. Townsend
Nuclear Technology | Volume 166 | Number 3 | June 2009 | Pages 263-272
Technical Paper | 2007 Space Nuclear Conference / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A8840
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculations have been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of a range of carbon- and hydrogen-rich materials for shielding against energetic heavy ions relevant to the galactic cosmic ray spectrum. Experimental work integrated with the calculations included both preparation and characterization of physical properties of candidate materials and measurements of fragmentation (breakup) of ion beams of 16O and 40Ar in the tens of GeV energy range in these materials. We have simulated the fragmentation experiments using both the HETC-HEDS and PHITS high-energy particle transport codes. The purposes of these computational simulations were to investigate the effectiveness as spacecraft personnel shielding of various novel as well as commercially available materials for future lunar and interplanetary missions and to validate the codes against experimental data. In the present contribution we report results of the fragmentation simulations and compare them with examples of the experimental measurements.
