William A Myers
Instructor
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William A. Myers was born in Fayetteville, AR 17 May 1934. He received the BSChE degree from the University of Arkansas on 2 June 1956 and was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Air Force through AFROTC that same day. Following completion of his MSChE and employment as a chemical engineer with DuPont he entered active duty with the Air Force in January 1958.
Except for a few, unsuccessful months in flying school he spent his entire Air Force career in the nuclear weapons program. Assignments included the McClellan Central Laboratory of the Atomic Energy Detection System, the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, operated by the University of California for the then Atomic Energy Commission, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Office of Military Applications of the Department of Energy. While at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory he was involved in radiochemical studies of debris from nuclear explosions, determined the mass yield distribution for fission products of 240Pu, and published the first determination of the abundance of naturally occurring 237Np.
He retired from the Air Force in 1984 and became Assistant Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the UofA. He is actively involved in studies of the age of the solar system based on isotopic ratios of Xe in meteorites and lunar samples. He is author or co-author of 40 publications, in the areas of nuclear chemistry or nuclear cosmochronology. He is a registered professional engineer, a member of the Arkansas Academy of Chemical Engineers, the American Chemical Society, the American Society for Metals, and the national professional chemistry fraternity Alpha Chi Sigma. He was the national president of Alpha Chi Sigma from 2000 to 2002.
He has, for over 44 years, been married to the former Satsuki Tanaka. They have a son, Mark, a daughter, Yuri, three granddaughters and one grandson.
Education
MSChE, University of Arkansas, 1958
Selected Publications
Myers, W. A., M. Linder, and R. S. Newbury, "The Isomer Ratio 236Np(l)/236Np(s) in the Reaction 237Np(n. 2n)236Np from Neutrons Produced in Thermonuclear Devices", J. Inorg. Nucl. Chem. 37, 637-639. (1975).
Myers, W. A., M. V. Kantelo, R. L. Osborne, A. L. Prindle, and D. R. Nethaway, "Fast Neutron Fission of 240Pu", Phys. Rev. C. 18, 1700-1705 (1978).
Kuroda, P. K. and W. A. Myers, "Xenology, FUN Anomalies and the Plutonium-244 Story", Origin of the Elements in the Solar System: Implications of Post 1957 Observations, edited by O. Manuel, Kluver Academic/Plenum Publishers, 431-509 (2000).
O. Manuel, William A. Myers, Yashmeet Singh, and Marcel Pleess, "The Oxygen to Carbon Ratio in the Solar Interior: Information from Nuclear Reaction Cross-Sections", J. of Fusion Energy 23, 55-62 (2005).