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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.”
Yi-Chun Lin, Shi-Hwa Su, Hui-Yu Tsai, Shiang-Huei Jiang
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 1 | October 2009 | Pages 74-78
Detectors | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 1) / Radiation Measurements and Instrumentation | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9103
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The purpose of this research is to estimate the wall effect of spherical graphite-walled cavity chambers using the Monte Carlo method to establish a 60Co air-kerma standard at the National Radiation Standard Laboratory of the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (NRSL/INER), Taiwan. For more than a decade, the validity of the wall correction term kwall determined by linear-extrapolation methods has been strongly challenged by the Monte Carlo method. In this paper, one goal was to evaluate in detail kwall for spherical chambers varying with wall thickness (0.1 to 2.5 cm), cavity size (1 to 1000 cm3), and incident photon energy (0.02 to 1.33 MeV). The other goal was to obtain kwall for self-fabricated, spherical chambers and then compare it with the historical values in 2003. A significant increase of 0.3% for air kerma in the 60Co field was expected. The difference of bilateral comparison between NRSL/INER and the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency was reduced when the calculated kwall, instead of the original estimated value of kwall, was applied for the derivation of the calibration factor. The NRSL/INER primary standards for air kerma will be adjusted in the near future to reflect the changes in kwall described in this work.
