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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.”
Masabumi Nishikawa, Kazuya Furuichi, Hiroki Takata
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 50 | Number 4 | November 2006 | Pages 521-527
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST06-A1275
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Concrete walls play the role not only of the structural material but also of the final barrier of a multiconfinement system of tritium in a fusion reactor or a tritium-handling facility. Therefore, it is required that the behavior of tritium in the concrete materials be clarified to certify the radiation safety of a fusion reactor. The diffusion coefficient of hydrogen in cement paste is obtained by using the permeation experiment in this study, and it is found that the diffusion coefficient of hydrogen in the cement paste is only one order magnitude smaller than the diffusion coefficient of hydrogen in air. Calculation using the diffusion coefficient obtained in this study indicates that the gaseous tritium, HT or T2, can permeate rather rapidly to the outside through the concrete wall of a tritium-handling facility. This calculation implies that installation of a tritium recovery system with proper decontamination performance is required to minimize the tritium transfer to the outer environment.
