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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.”
Carmen García-Rosales, Sigrid Deschka, Wolfgang Hohenauer, Reiner Duwe, Eric Gauthier, Jochen Linke, Martin Lochter, Werner K. W. M. Malléner, Laurenz Plöchl, Peter Rödhammer, Armando Salito, Asdex-Upgrade Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 32 | Number 2 | September 1997 | Pages 263-276
Technical Paper | First Wall Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST97-A19896
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Tiles of fine-grain graphite coated with tungsten layers by different plasma spray techniques (thickness 100 to 550 µm) and by physical vapor deposition (PVD) (thickness 20 to 100 µm) were subjected to heat fluxes, as expected for the divert or of the Axially Symmetric Divertor Experiment (ASDEX)-Upgrade tokamak. By a stepwise increase of the applied heat flux up to 16 MW/m2 and different pulse durations (1 to 5 s), the maximum load for disabling damage of the coating was determined. The fatigue behavior of the coatings was investigated by cyclic loading. The results show that plasma spray coatings are able to withstand heat loads up to 15 MW/m2 for a 2-s pulse without structural changes and cyclic loading with 1000 cycles at 10 MW/m2 and a 2-s pulse. The PVD coatings show damage by crack formation and melting at slightly lower heat loads than most of the plasma spray coatings. Under cyclic loading, the thin PVD coatings fail by extensive crack formation. The results of the tests indicate that the good performance of the plasma spray coatings is related to their higher porosity, which provides a crack-arresting mechanism, and to their mechanical strength.