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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.”
Francesco Scaffidi-Argentina, Mario Dalle Donne, Claudio Ronchi, Claudio Ferrero
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 32 | Number 2 | September 1997 | Pages 179-195
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A19890
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A mechanistic model for the description of helium swelling and tritium release in neutron-irradiated beryllium is presented. Initially aimed at predicting the mechanical stability and the tritium retention capacity of beryllium in a fusion reactor blanket, the ANFIBE code was finally extended to provide an exhaustive description of the properties of this material under fast neutron irradiation. In-solid diffusion and precipitation of helium and tritium, radiation re-solution, and bubble growth and coalescence in different structural domains of the material are taken into account and formulated in a compact rate equation system, enabling the evolution of swelling and release to be calculated under stationary and nonstationary irradiation and temperature conditions. A particular feature of the model is the treatment of the growth of gas bubbles and pores in the interactive compressive stress field created by the gas precipitated in cavities of different sizes and at different pressures, enabling a realistic and accurate calculation of the stress-sensitive intergranular-swelling components and of the related pore-venting effects. The salient physical hypotheses of the model are discussed, as well as the formalism adopted for the description of helium and tritium diffusion precipitation and swelling.