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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.”
Takeo Nishitani, Satoshi Sato, Kentaro Ochiai, Chuzo Kutsukake, Shigeru Tanaka, Yuichi Abe, Chikara Konno
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 52 | Number 4 | November 2007 | Pages 791-795
Technical Paper | Nuclear Analysis and Experiments | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1587
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Blanket neutronics experiments were conducted for the development of the water-cooled pebble bed type ITER Test Blanket Module (TBM) using the Fusion Neutronics Source (FNS). Slab mockup assemblies based on the water-cooled pebble bed ITER TBM including water panels and/or a breeder pebble layer were irradiated by 14 MeV neutrons. After the irradiation, the amount of tritium produced in the diagnostic Li2CO3 pellets or breeder pebbles is measured by liquid scintillation counting method. The C/E ratios for the tritium production rate in those experiments are within 1 ± 0.05. A plan of the neutronics test on ITER-TBM and the neutronic diagnostics in the module are discussed. Micro fission chambers and compact activation foil transfer systems to be embedded in TBM are proposed for the neutron flux and neutron spectrum measurements, respectively.
