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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.”
B. Juste, R. Miró, J. M. Campayo, S. Diez, G. Verdú
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 3 | December 2009 | Pages 637-642
Accelerators | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (PART 3) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A9281
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The work focuses on reconstructing, by means of a scatter analysis method, the primary beam photon spectrum of a linear accelerator. This technique is based on irradiating the isocenter of a rectangular block made of methacrylate placed at 100 cm from the source and measuring scattered particles around the plastic at several specific positions with different scatter angles. The MCNP5 Monte Carlo code has been used to simulate the particle transport of monoenergetic beams and register the scatter measurement after contact with the attenuator. Measured ionization values are input necessary for calculating the spectrum as the sum of monoenergetic individual energy bins using the Schiff bremsstrahlung model. The measurements have been made in an Elekta Precise linac using a 6-MeV photon beam. Relative depth and profile dose curves calculated in a water phantom using the reconstructed spectrum agree with the experimentally measured dose data to within 5%.